
Copyright N 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 






THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS 
Edited ty JOHN H. KERR, D. D. 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS 
CONCERNING 

CHRISTIAN CONDUCT 



Andrew C. Zenos, D. D. 



THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS 

CONCERNING 

HIS OWN MISSION. Frank H. Foster. Ready. 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE CHURCH. 
Geerhardus Vos. Ready. 
GOD THE FATHER 

Archibald Thomas Robertson. " 

THE SCRIPTURES. David James Burrell. 
THE HOLY SPIRIT. Louis B. Crane 
CHRISTIAN CONDUCT. Andrew C. Zenos " 

HIS OWN PERSON hi preparation. 

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

THE FUTURE LIFE 

THE FAMILY 

A Series of volumes on the " Teachings of Jesus " 
by eminent writers and divines. 

Cloth bound. i2mo. Price 75 cts. each postpaid. 

AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS 



CONCERNING 



CHRISTIAN CONDUCT 



By 

Andrew C. Zenos, D.D. 



AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 

150 NASSAU STREET 
NEW YORK 



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Copyright^ igo$, by 
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TO MY WIFE 

WHOSE CONSISTENT CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP 

HAS THROWN A FLOOD OF LIGHT ON 

THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK. 



PREFACE 

rHE subject of this little book 
will be at once recognized as a 
very large and important one. 
Broadly defined, it has often been made 
the theme of full and detailed treatment. 
The justification for a new presentation 
of it does not lie in the fact of a need for a 
thorough and extensive reinvestigation of 
it, but rather of a call for a condensed and 
brief restatement in popular form of the 
essentials of Jesus' thought. In such an 
effort, the processes by which results are 
reached are necessarily left out of sight. 
Notes have been carefully avoided, ex- 
cept in two or three instances where their 

vii 



viii Preface 

insertion seemed to be more than usually 
illuminative. Of course, it will be easily 
understood that exhaustiveness could not 
have been expected, and has not been 
aimed at in such a brief treatment of the 
subject. The general principles alone 
are given. The reader who is desirous 
of pursuing the subject into minuter de- 
tails will know where to find these ade- 
quately treated. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Introductory i 

II. The Christian Man : Presupposi- 
tions of Christian Conduct. . 14 

III. The Antecedents of Christ's 

Teaching on Conduct. ... 29 

IV. The Mainspring of Christian 

Conduct 43 

V. The Comprehensive Rule of Con- 
duct : The Golden Rule. . . 60 

VI. Self-Culture 71 

VII. The Sabbath 85 

VIII. The Christian in Social Relations. 97 

IX. The Christian in the State. . .112 

X. The Christian in the Family. . 123 

XI. The Christian in Business. . . .136 

XII. The Christian in the Church. . 146 

XIII. Summary 158 

Indices 163 

ix 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY. 

The Sources. 

rHE critical questions regarding 
the Gospels are, for good or for 
ill, before the Christian public, 
and it does not become those who wish 
to have a perfect knowledge of the mind 
of Christ to ignore them. It is not nec- 
essary, however, in the study of a special 
department of the teaching of Jesus to 
rehearse the processes by which results 
are reached. The results, no doubt, de- 
pend largely on the methods employed, 
and the methods are complex, taking for 



2 Christian Conduct 

granted in many instances what stands in 
need of ample demonstration. Partly on 
account of their complexity, leaving it 
open to the critic to emphasize some 
elements or stages in them and minimize 
or pass over others, and partly because of 
personal points of view, the results 
reached by different critics and schools 
of criticism differ widely. 

On the one side stand those who can 
find nothing in the Gospels of what Jesus 
said with the possible exception of a few 
colorless utterances,* on the other those 
who regard everything reported by the 
evangelists as spoken verbatim et literatim 
by the Lord Himself ; and between these 
many shades and varieties of interpreters. 
The success of our own task depends less 
on our reaching the exact phraseology of 
our sources and more on a thorough ap- 
preciation of the general spirit and prin- 
ciples of Jesus. There can be no ques- 
tion regarding the great moral change 

* Schmiedel, in Encycl. BibL, art., " Gospels." 



Introductory 3 

which He wrought in the conduct of 
His disciples ; and indirectly through the 
contagion of their example, as well as 
through the force of their teachings, 
upon multitudes of others in the apostolic 
generation. Even those who can see no 
more than nine, more or less, genuine 
sayings of Jesus in the Gospels must ad- 
mit that the Master uttered such things 
as those reported. In what words He 
uttered them is a matter of comparatively 
less importance to those who attempt to 
identify the general outline and spirit of 
His teaching rather than its precise forms 
and ramifications. 

To avoid misunderstanding, however, 
we may say that we hold the evangelists 
to be correct reporters of Jesus' word. 
There is a certain uniqueness about these 
words, a certain characteristic ring, which 
it is impossible to believe the simple and 
uneducated men the Apostles are known 
to have been, could have infused into 
them. There is, moreover, a verisimili- 



4 Christian Conduct 

tude in the theory that these reports are 
generally speaking verbal reproductions 
of what Jesus said. The time and the 
place were propitious for the reception 
and repetition of maxims and parables 
such as we find in the evangelic narra- 
tives. The practice was common in the 
schools for the teacher to frame his 
thought in some striking, carefully- 
balanced sentence or similitude and thus 
profoundly to impress it on the minds of 
his disciples. The disciples could, and 
did, then go forth and repeat His utter- 
ance with literal exactness. In the Wis- 
dom form of the " Saying " {Logion), 
a special literary vehicle was developed, 
admirably suited to this end. It em- 
bodied in a symmetrical and rhythmical 
couplet or triplet, a teaching worthy of 
being remembered and disseminated. 
The Wisdom form may not have been 
used by Jesus Himself as extensively as 
some scholars would have us believe* but 

* Briggs, Ethical Teaching of Jesus. 



Introductory 5 

it was manifestly used by all the public 
teachers of the day. That many utter- 
ances of Jesus had been preserved in the 
form of the " Saying' ' is put beyond 
question, apart from the Gospels them- 
selves, by the groups of Sayings (Logia) 
of Jesus recently brought to light by 
Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt. 

Upon the whole the critical considera- 
tions support the belief that the words as- 
cribed to Jesus in the Gospels are His, 
and that we have in them no mythological 
growths but actual historical speeches 
embodying His distinctive thought.* 



* Wernle, who cannot be accused of leaning towards the tra- 
ditional or anticritical views on questions of criticism in the 
New Testament, says of Matthew : u Without any additions of 
his own, merely by selecting the words of eternal life, he has 
bequeathed to us a picture of all that is essential in Christian- 
ity, which is striking in its grandeur " {Beginnings of Chris- 
tianity , Lpp. 148, 149). Jiilicher, another representative of 
thorough-going criticism in the New Testament sphere, says : 
" The true merit of the synoptists is that, in spite of all the 
poetical touches they employ, they did not repaint, but only 
handed on the Christ of history." And again, " As a rule, there 
lies in all the synoptic Logia a kernel of individual character 



6 Christian Conduct 

But when the four Gospels are com- 
pared with one another, even in the most 
casual manner, there emerge certain ques- 
tions concerning their mutual relations. 
The first three and the fourth are at once 
seen to stand upon different levels. The 
first question, therefore, is as to the origin 
and meaning of this difference. The first 
three again are seen to be more similar 
in language and plan of arrangement than 
could be accounted for by the mere fact 
that they were dealing with one common 
subject. The second question is thus as 
to the origin and meaning of the similar- 
ities of the first three. As these three 
are called the Synoptic Gospels, this second 
question has been called the Synoptic 
Problem. 

To enter at all adequately into the dis- 
cussion of the Synoptic problem would 
take us too far from our immediate theme 
and require more space than can possibly 

so inimitable and so fresh that their authenticity is above all 
suspicion." (Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 371, 372.) 



Introductory 7 

be given to it in our little treatise. To 
treat of it but casually would be useless. 
It is far better to dismiss the subject with 
the affirmation of our conviction that the 
net result of the discussion will be a 
clearer conception of the teaching of Jesus 
and a fuller knowledge of what He 
thought, planned and did. 

The relation of the Gospel of John to 
the Synoptic Gospels is also a larger sub- 
ject than can be properly treated in as 
brief a way as our space permits. Never- 
theless, this can be said, that whatever 
differences may emerge elsewhere be- 
tween the first three and the fourth Gos- 
pels, in the sphere of ethical teaching, ab- 
solutely no differences have been pointed 
out. The Jesus of John holds up the 
same ideals, illustrates the same funda- 
mental principles, and rouses the same 
impulses and motives of conduct as the 
Jesus of the Synoptists. If the Fourth 
Gospel presents the conduct of the fol- 
lower of Jesus in a clearer light, it is not 



8 Christian Conduct 

because the author has added anything 
essential of his own creation to the Mas- 
ter's ideas, but because he was writing at 
a time when experience had enabled him 
to realize more of their infinite stretch 
and richness, and to see deeper into their 
inner life and more broadly into their 
bearing. 

Jesus Interest in Conduct 

Another point in question may be dis- 
missed with a single word. It is that 
of the exact outlook of Jesus into the 
future. It is held on one side that 
Jesus saw the Kingdom of God which 
He preached as in the future (not in the 
distant future, but in the immediate) as a 
consummation to be realized by a sudden 
manifestation of the power of God, carry- 
ing with it the destruction of the world- 
powers and the establishment of the 
Messianic reign. It is held on the other 
side that Jesus looked upon the Kingdom 
as already established by Hiaown coming 



Introductory 9 

into the world, and that He foresaw for 
it a long development upon earth. Our 
own view coincides more nearly with the 
latter position ; but whether one or the 
other of these positions be true, His teach- 
ing on conduct is not materially affected. 
It remains true that Jesus commended 
to His disciples the same kind of moral 
conduct whether the world were to last 
ten milleniums or twenty-four hours. 
They were to live the same kind of life 
whether they expected the Kingdom to 
be ushered in some time in the future, no 
matter how soon or how late, or accepted 
it as already in operation and calling upon 
them to obey its laws. 

But did Jesus after all concern Himself 
with conduct at all ? Was He not rather 
a Teacher of truth, a Revealer of God and 
heaven, and of the way of eternal life ? 
If by conduct be meant simply a manner 
of outward bearing towards those with 
whom one has to do in earthly relations, 
and if this manner of acting is conceived 



io Christian Conduct 

of as beginning and ending with these 
relations, then we may say that Jesus was 
but little concerned with mere conduct. 
But if conduct is the fruit of an inner 
knowledge of self and of God and of one's 
destiny, then it was not possible for Jesus 
to disregard or minimize it. The ques- 
tion, Did Jesus lay down a law of conduct, 
or did He teach a doctrine of God ? be- 
comes in this light an irrelevant one. 
" Conduct" says Matthew Arnold, "is 
three-fourths of life." If so, it is the 
three-fourths that is exposed to view. 
The other fourth is not in itself open to 
observation. But its existence and nature 
must necessarily be evinced by that 
which is visible. Neither the visible 
three-fourths nor the invisible one-fourth, 
however, can be separated from one an- 
other. 

To put the case in other words, we 
may say that Jesus is concerned first of 
all and throughout with the salvation of 
men. He teaches truth ; He stimulates 



Introductory 1 1 

desire ; He arouses aspirations ; He 
awakens loves and hatreds, love of that 
which is noble and good, hatred of that 
which is mean and destructive ; He calls 
to repentance and He promises forgive- 
ness ; and all in order that men may be 
brought to the saving knowledge of God 
the Father, and received into the Kingdom 
He had established. The impartation 
of knowledge has a very important func- 
tion in the bringing about of this result; 
so has the quickening of desire and aspira- 
tion. But only when these burst out in- 
to the blossom and fruit of conduct, does 
the full revelation of the work of Jesus 
come. 

His own description of His mission is 
given in the words " I came that they 
may have life " (John x. 10). The nature 
and results of this life He further de- 
scribes in the allegory of the Vine and 
the Branches. As the life of the branches 
is tested by their fruit-bearing, so the life 
of His followers is tested by right think- 



12 Christian Conduct 

ing about Him and His teaching, and by 
right conduct under His guidance. 

Conduct and Life 

What now is the sphere of Christian 
Conduct and how is it differentiated from 
that of Christian Life ? Life is a term 
which does not easily lend itself to clear 
definition. And yet, on the other hand, 
it is a term whose meaning is not easily 
mistaken. The Christian life is the whole 
spiritual movement which begins with 
the appearance of Christ before the soul, 
and the soul's acceptance of Him as the 
revelation of God the Father. This 
movement necessarily includes an inner 
and an outer development. As an inner 
movement, it begins with the quickening 
of spiritual insight, the apprehension of 
Christ as the Redeemer from sin, and 
the surrender of one's will and affections 
to Him as the Lord. 

As an outward movement, it consists 
in regulating one's relations to God and 



Introductory 13 

to the world of animate and inanimate 
beings, so as to carry out certain ideas 
and actualize certain ideals which have 
entered into one's purview through Christ. 
And this is Christian conduct. Our in- 
quiry will, therefore, take the direction 
of a search for the guidance which Jesus 
furnishes to His followers as they strive 
to conform their outward actions to the 
new and distinctively Christian ideals. 



CHAPTER II 

The Christian Man : Presupposi- 
tions of Christian Conduct. 

rHAT man's ideal of conduct will 
depend in a large measure on his 
conception of his origin, nature 
and destiny, is hardly open to question. 
No ethical teacher who has failed to 
ground his system on firm foundations 
in these matters has succeeded in fur- 
thering the cause of ethical culture and 
development. Jesus is not an exception 
to the rule. There is a difference, how- 
ever, between Jesus and other ethical 
teachers, and it lies in the fact that 
whereas they build theories of psychology 
14 



The Christian Man 15 

as a substructure for their ethics, He 
goes deeper and grounds His teaching on 
the religious nature of man. He relates 
the moral nature directly with God. 

Synthetic View of Man 

It is one of the most obvious features 
of Jesus' view of man that it is synthetic 
and not analytic. Man is not to Him a 
complex being, consisting of body, soul 
and spirit ; intellect, sensibility and will ; 
cognitive and motive powers ; affections, 
desires and conscience ; but a unitary 
organism. The distinctions carried in 
these terms are not necessarily wrong or 
misleading : neither does Jesus ignore 
them altogether. The distinction be- 
tween body and soul is indeed so far 
from being ignored in His teaching that 
it is quite clearly brought into the fore- 
ground, when He urges His disciples 
not to "be afraid of them that kill the 
body, but are not able to kill the soul" 
(Matt. x. 28 ; Luke xii. 4). But it is not 



1 6 Christian Conduct 

wrought out into a psychological theory. 
It is simply made the ground of a practi- 
cal appeal in behalf of conduct worthy 
of the child of God. Similarly, with 
the so-called " faculties of the mind," 
while the varied activities designated by 
them are assumed to exist, they are no- 
where enumerated, classified, defined or 
distinguished from one another with a 
view to scientific precision. 

Neither does Jesus take any special in- 
terest in the question of the origin of the 
soul. There were those in His day who 
like the Essenes and the followers of 
Philo held that every human soul had a 
prenatal existence in a most subtle, 
ethereal form, that it was dragged down 
and entangled in the body, as in a prison 
cell, and held there until the time of its 
liberation.* The more prevalent view, 
basing itself on the Old Testament, pre- 
sented each soul as a special creation of 

*Jos. de Bell. Jud. II, viii, II ; Philo, Mund. Op., 22 [1,15]; 
46 [1, 32]. 



The Christian Man 17 

God. But Jesus takes no notice of these 
discussions. 

Conduct Grounded in Religion 

It is otherwise with the deeper lying 
rock of the religious nature. On this 
Jesus builds His ethics. About it there- 
fore He has something definite to say. 
Whatever the origin or the inner consti- 
tution of the soul, or its relation to the 
body may be, man as man, either stands 
or is capable of standing in the relation 
of a child to God. Without entering 
into the question whether all human be- 
ings are the children of God by creation, 
or may become so by faith in Jesus 
Christ (a question which the more it is 
studied, the more it appears to possess a 
merely verbal importance), we may as- 
sert that the whole course of a human 
being in this life and in the life to come 
is determined by his willingness to live in 
the relation of a child to God. 



1 8 Christian Conduct 

Immortality 

But if a child of God, man has the 
pledge of immortality. Immortality is 
not to be mistaken for eternal life. That 
expression is used in the Fourth Gospel 
as the broad equivalent of all the bless- 
ings brought to man by Jesus Christ 
through His revelation of God the 
Father. Immortality is simply the death- 
lessness of personality. Eternal life is 
the life lived even before bodily death by 
him who has come to the true knowl- 
edge of God through Jesus Christ (John 
xvii. 4). Immortality is associated with 
the resurrection of the dead. It is only 
as He is approached with the question of 
the Sadducees regarding the resurrection 
that Jesus teaches immortality. They 
thought they would perplex Him with 
the implications of a second life. He 
answered : The second life is not only 
not difficult to account for when one di- 
vests the idea of it of merely earthly 



The Christian Man 19 

elements, but it is a fact apart from the 
reembodiment of the departed soul. 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are now liv- 
ing ; for God, who said that He was 
their God, could not have done so unless 
they were immortal. " God is not the 
God of the dead, but of the living " 
(Matt. xxii. 32). When God pledges 
Himself to such a relation of intimacy to 
mankind, the pledge means that He has 
made men different from the brute cre- 
ation and endowed them with deathless- 
ness. 

There is nothing inconsistent in this 
with the Apostle's dictum that "the 
King of kings and Lord of lords . . . 
only hath immortality " (I Tim. vi. 15). 
For it is the immortality that is conveyed 
by the Creator to the creature, not the 
immortality of the absolute and uncon- 
ditioned being that is asserted of man. In 
one sense, there is no immortality out- 
side of God ; for only God is in Himself 
deathless, but those whom God chooses 



20 Christian Conduct 

to make deathless are certainly such. 
Without putting it into an academic 
formula, Jesus thus plainly declares the 
doctrine of human immortality. 

Inestimable Value of Man 

And if man is immortal, he is of ines- 
timable value. He may not, must not 
think too meanly of himself. Nay, he 
will find it hard to think of himself 
highly enough. The temptation which 
assails most human beings is to think too 
highly of themselves in comparison with 
others and too unworthily in comparison 
with the ideal for them designed by the 
Creator. It was because they thoroughly 
yielded to this temptation that the Phar- 
isees of Jesus' day on the one hand 
looked upon the publicans and sinners 
as so far inferior to themselves that they 
gave up all hope of rescuing them from 
their evil manner of life, and on the 
other hand thought so unworthily of 
themselves that they were satisfied with 



The Christian Man 21 

hollow externalism and fell easily into 
the snares of hypocrisy and pride. They 
were indeed in their own judgment on a 
different and a vastly higher level than 
the reprobates whom they called sinners 
(Am Haaretz), but they did not value 
themselves highly enough to aim at the 
best within their reach. 

Jesus' view of the dignity of human 
nature was revolutionary. It found a 
priceless jewel in what was looked upon 
as a useless rubbish heap. It called men 
in the lowest depths of degradation to 
rise to sublime heights and gave them 
the promise of help if they would only 
try to soar. It made it worth while for 
every one without exception to make 
the effort to live a better life. 

But Jesus did not ignore sin or mini- 
mize the greatness and difficulty of the 
task of regeneration. Nor did He lower 
ideals of the divine law and underestimate 
the seriousness of transgressing it. Sin 
as sin is vastly more abhorrent to Him 



22 Christian Conduct 

than it is to the Pharisee who gathers his 
skirts about him lest by touching the 
sinner he should become contaminated. 
Jesus came to save that which was lost. 
He was so thoroughly possessed by the 
infinite moment of the difference be- 
tween the lost and the saved that He was 
willing " to give His life a ransom for 
many" (Matt. xx. 25; Mark x. 45). 
The havoc wrought by sin even in the 
physical man, the tears and groans and 
soul-anguish it caused in this life, always 
stirred Him to sympathy for its victims, 
to hatred for the evil itself and to saving 
deeds of supernatural power. Sinners 
were lost — lost to God, lost to themselves, 
lost to their fellow-creatures, and He 
would do all that it was possible to save 
them. 

Jesus and Utilitarianism 

Thus Jesus tied conduct to a faith in 
God, and in man's nature and destiny as 
related to God. He infused into it the life 



The Christian Man 23 

of motives drawn from the eternal sphere- 
It is needless to say that His standpoint is 
the very opposite of utilitarianism. It 
has indeed often been presented as essen- 
tially utilitarian. But the presentation is 
nothing more than a caricature. " Do 
right that you may receive a reward in 
heaven/' is reported to be the sum and 
substance of its philosophic basis. But 
while Jesus does hold eternal rewards 
and penalties in prospect, He does so not 
in order to induce men to do right and 
eschew evil, but in order to help them 
bear the hardships which a utilitarian 
world will impose upon them when they 
attempt to follow the path of duty. It 
is only to counteract the manifest paralyz- 
ing effects of persecution and suffering, 
and steel His followers to endurance that 
He points to what lies beyond (Matt. x. 
28, ff. ; xix. 29 ; John xvi. 33). So far 
from inculcating a utilitarian ethics, Jesus 
is constantly warning His disciples that 
He has nothing to promise them and 



24 Christian Conduct 

nothing to give them for their pains but 
the hatred of the world and the burden 
of the cross. 

Jesus and Intuitional Ethics 

On the other hand, Jesus does not call 
on men to do right just because it is 
right. Philosophically, that may be a 
tenable position. At any rate, it is a 
fairly debatable thesis. It is quite true, 
in a certain sense, that right must be 
loved and done for its own sake. But 
Jesus lifts the curtain from behind that 
flat and perspectiveless proposition, and 
reveals a world of personalities with which 
moral conduct is inextricably associated. 
" Do right because you love God and 
God loves you, and you are eternally re- 
lated to Him in the closest of all relation- 
ships/' is His answer to the basal ques- 
tion of ethics. 

Without, therefore, discrediting theo- 
retical ethics as a science, but rather 
making it all the more necessary and in- 



The Christian Man 25 

teresting by the enthusiasm which He 
creates in the whole subject, Jesus de- 
votes Himself primarily and almost ex- 
clusively to the practical side of morality. 
He has no word to say as to whether 
conscience is a single and separate faculty 
or a complex of tendencies and powers 
in man. The question, Did man receive 
his moral nature by a direct ab extra en- 
dowment, or by a subconscious evolu- 
tion and gradual development, does not 
emerge in the part of the field which He 
has chosen to occupy. These and all 
other kindred matters are left to the in- 
tellect of man as legitimate regions for 
exploration and investigation, just as the 
mechanism of the heavens or the knowl- 
edge and uses of the great nature powers 
are. It is a privilege given to men to 
investigate, discuss and use what they 
can find in these spheres. As for Jesus, 
He is bent upon the more vital task of 
begetting living children of God. To 
this end He quickens the consciousness 



26 Christian Conduct 

of kinship with God, and with it the im- 
pulses towards a complete and completely 
holy life. "Ye therefore shall be per- 
fect, as your heavenly Father is perfect " 
(Matt. v. 48). 

Jesus the Ideal 

One more aspect of Jesus' general at- 
titude towards conduct must be men- 
tioned, that He enforces by living ex- 
ample what He imparts in oral teaching. 
Here, too, He differs from all other 
teachers. Some in His own day He had 
reason to reproach as " loading men with 
burdens grievous to be borne/ ' and them- 
selves not touching the burdens " with 
one of their fingers " (Luke xi. 46). In 
all ages there have existed imitators and 
predecessors of these, men who could 
easily and fluently discourse on the beauty 
of virtues which they did not even try to 
practice. At the most, they could only 
make attempts to live up to their ideals 
and confess when they had done their 



The Christian Man 27 

best that they had come short of actual- 
izing them in their lives {video meliora de- 
teriora sequor). Jesus, on the contrary, 
taught nothing which He did not illus- 
trate with His perfect example. Indeed, 
because His teaching is expressed in 
human language, and human language 
is interpreted by those who hear or 
read it according to the best there is in 
them, the mere oral teaching of Jesus 
would have conveyed a much less ade- 
quate idea of what He designed His fol- 
lowers to be, had not He Himself placed 
the highest interpretation upon that 
teaching by His own life. The example 
of Jesus may thus be said from the point 
of view of the disciples to transcend His 
teaching. As one who knew Him 
closely through all the days of His min- 
istry declared " He did no sin, neither 
was guile found in His mouth ; who, 
when He was reviled, reviled not again ; 
when He suffered, He threatened not" 
(I Pet. ii. 22, 23). 



28 Christian Conduct 

It was impossible, speaking even from 
the merest human point of view, and 
without regard to the presence of the 
Holy Spirit, that teaching framed with 
such unerring insight into the nature of 
the subject, adapted so marvellously to 
the needs of men, and carried with such 
a living force of example, should totally 
fail. Coming into the hearts of men 
full of frailty, and working against mighty 
forces of evil deeply rooted, it has never 
indeed been fully realized in the life of 
any single man besides the one who gave 
it to the world. But as an ideal it has 
commanded unbounded admiration, chal- 
lenged comparison with the best the 
world has had to offer, and drawn count- 
less multitudes out of degradation and 
misery into nobility and godlikeness. 



CHAPTER III 

The Antecedents of Christ's Teach- 
ing on Conduct. 

JESUS spoke to men who were al- 
ready measurably equipped with 
ethical conceptions. He did not 
assume that the minds of His disciples 
were blank tablets on which anything 
might be written. He spoke with due 
regard to the effect which His own teach- 
ing might have on these preconceptions, 
and to the reciprocal effect of the pre- 
conceptions on His teaching. He found 
them familiar with a definite law of life, 
which was upon the whole sound and 
helpful. No law of life adopted by a 

29 



30 Christian Conduct 

large section of humanity is ever totally 
devoid of a sound kernel at its core, no 
matter how much error and unwhole- 
someness may have grown about it. But 
the law governing the people with whom 
Jesus had direct dealings was no mere 
human law, adopted or developed as a 
consequence of ordinary experience. It 
was given from above, and, though de- 
signed for crude ages, it contained prin- 
ciples of eternal validity. And it was 
ever the way of Jesus to lay hold of that 
which was sound, and work it out into 
its fullness. He " did not come to de- 
stroy, but to fulfill/' 

Moreover, in doing so, He adapted 
His work, as already said, to the condi- 
tions and circumstances. He did not 
scatter seed irrespective of the prospects 
of growth. He taught the uselessness of 
casting pearls before swine. The law of 
adaptation was always before Him. He 
did not believe in putting new wine into 
old wine skins. Contrary as it might ap- 



Christ's Teaching on Conduct 31 

pear to expectation, He held that even 
moral regulations must be suited to the 
capacities of those who are to receive and 
live by them. " The hardness of their 
hearts " did lead to the adaptation of the 
law of marriage to the men of the Old 
Testament, and to the permission of 
divorce upon conditions where the ideal 
could not be appreciated and enforced. 
And if there was that which was relative 
and changeable in the old conditions, 
there was the possibility of advance upon 
it. It was at least rudimentary and could 
be developed. " Ye have heard that it 
was said," He declared with reference to 
the old ; and then set over His own more 
perfect thought in the formula, " But I 
say unto you." 

The Old Testament Law of Conduct 

What then was the Old Testament 
law of conduct, which Jesus used as a 
starting-point ? It was a law in which 
God was recognized as supreme, and 



32 Christian Conduct 

conformity to His expressed will as the 
norm for the faithful Israelite. God's 
will moreover had been definitely re- 
vealed in a series of explicit command- 
ments, the Ten Words of the Decalogue. 
But the Decalogue bears on its very face 
the marks of a preparatory stage. It is 
the code of a society in its infancy. It 
prescribes the duty of the individual, but 
it does so in the negative form of pro- 
hibition. It hedges the path on every 
side with a "Thou shalt not." It is in- 
deed based upon a comprehensive and 
unified view of the sphere of duty ; but 
this unity is conventional ; it is imposed 
by the framer of the commandment ; it 
does not inhere in the subject itself. The 
subdivision and arrangement of the law 
in the Ten Commandments are only such 
as to help in the grasping and holding of 
their content by a people in the earlier 
stages of civilization. It is this feature 
of it that makes the Decalogue so per- 
manently valuable in the instruction of 



Chrisfs Teaching on Conduct 33 

the young, and will continue to give it 
vitality as a pedagogical instrument as 
long as there shall be undeveloped minds 
in the world. But it is significant at the 
same time of its elementary character. 
And so it is to the Decalogue that Jesus 
goes to illustrate the contrast between the 
old and the new morality, for here He 
finds the germ of the true which also, 
however, is in need of development. 
Apart from this development it is quite 
inadequate. 

Two characteristics distinguish the con- 
duct prescribed for the Old Testament 
saint. First, he was never to forget that 
he was an Israelite. In his conscious- 
ness, there should always be vivid the 
thought of the special favor he was en- 
joying as a member of God's chosen 
people. First as a member of a tribe, 
then as of a nation, the descendent of 
Abraham must live worthily of his privi- 
leges. But in the days of Jesus, the time 
had become ripe for the passing from 



34 Christian Conduct 

this nationalism to the consciousness of 
the unity of the human race. It is not 
meant, of course, that the average Jew 
realized this change, but that the history 
immediately preceding had brought the 
world to the point where a conduct could 
be held up as ideal in which the con- 
sciousness of merely national relation- 
ships should fade into comparative indif- 
ference. 

Secondly, the Israelite viewed every 
detail of conduct as consisting of two 
sides, a Godward and heavenward, and a 
manward and earthward side. And the 
Godward was symbolized in a ceremo- 
nial religious act. It was not simply that 
the religious ceremonial stood as a con- 
stant expression of the religious nature, 
but that each part of a human life's 
whole make-up had its particular cere- 
monial. Birth and death, work and rest, 
morning and evening, peace and strife, 
the home and the market, were associ- 
ated with special ceremonial symbols. 



Chrisfs Teaching on Conduct 35 

If a man committed a trespass against 
his neighbor, it was not enough that he 
should make restitution. The act of 
restitution must be accompanied by a 
special sacrifice to Jehovah. 

Both of these features were done away 
with by Jesus. The consciousness of 
nationalism disappeared as He practiced 
His kindnesses to non-Israelites, such as 
the Syro-Phcenician woman, the Roman 
centurion, and the Samaritans with whom 
He came in touch during the course of 
His ministry. The ritual element was 
put away even more summarily because 
it had come to be a source of many seri- 
ous abuses. The ceremonial accompani- 
ment originally intended to indicate 
God's presence and share in every rela- 
tion of life was practically emptied of its 
holiness, and in its jejune form it usurped 
the place of the moral principles of life. 
Hence Jesus sent men to the prophets 
to learn " what that means, I will have 
mercy and not sacrifice.' ' 



36 Christian Conduct 

So far then as the Old Testament is 
concerned, Jesus recognizes it as the 
preparation and basis for His own teach- 
ing. He finds in it some special provi- 
sions meant to be effectual for a time and 
meet passing conditions. With the dis- 
appearance of these conditions, those 
provisions were to lapse. He finds, 
however, also, some principles which 
could not pass away because they are 
valid for all time. The primitive and 
ideal was unchangeable, the prescriptive 
was temporary. " From the beginning 
it was not so." 

Though it may be true in one sense 
that the ethics of Jesus are a develop- 
ment of the Old Testament ethics, in 
another sense this is not the case. 
Neither the Old Testament nor the en- 
vironment can account for Jesus. He is 
" a divine miracle in that age and envi- 
ronment " (Wellhausen). His relation 
to His age is that of the transcendent per- 
sonality, who, emerging in it stands above 



Christ 's Teaching on Conduct 37 

it. He is in it to mould it, not to be 
affected by it. 

Pagan Ethical Teaching 

Does Jesus owe anything to pagan 
teachers for His ideas on conduct ? If 
the question has reference to a direct in- 
debtedness based upon a first-hand con- 
tact with the great masters of heathen 
thought, it can only be answered in the 
negative. If it refer to the filtering 
in of Greek, Hindoo, or even Persian 
and Babylonian elements into Jewish 
thought, it is a question of the indebt- 
edness of Judaism to paganism, not one 
of a relation of Jesus to heathen teachers. 
Jesus stands towards the pagan elements 
of thought as He does towards those 
originally developed within Judaism. 
They are the conditions He recognizes 
and with reference to which He frames 
the form of His teaching. So far as they 
are true and sound, they are the germs 
which He fosters and develops. They 



38 Christian Conduct 

are the materials which He organizes 
and vitalizes into a living entity. They 
are never the things which He borrows 
and retails even though in a modified 
form as the Stoics did the thoughts of 
Socrates and Plato. 

As a matter of fact, there were some 
rich and valuable ethical teachings gath- 
ered together in ancient heathendom. 
Not to speak of the mechanical maxims 
of Confucius, and the more dynamic 
ethical precepts of Buddha, as being too 
far removed from Palestine to enter into 
vital connection with anything that Jesus 
may have taught, there were in Greece 
and Alexandria moral conceptions current 
which exerted a strong influence through- 
out the Judaic world. Virtue, temper- 
ance, wisdom and justice had been 
preached by Plato himself as the four 
sides of a perfect character. The Stoics 
seizing on one of these, that of temper- 
ance, or self-control, had wrought out a 
perfect ideal of a life of calmness and 



Christ's Teaching on Conduct 39 

strength. The Epicureans in their turn, 
by turning the Platonic wisdom into the 
practical sphere had set the goal of hap- 
piness as the test and end of all conduct.* 
With these ideals and systems of the 
Greeks, the teaching of Jesus was des- 
tined to come into contact by and by. 
But in its origin it was entirely indepen- 
dent of them. Its historical connection 
leads back rather into Hebrew prophecy. 
If we use this term to cover broadly the 
ethical content of the Old Testament, we 
shall find that conduct is defined here 
either as a matter of requirement by God 
Himself, as in the Decalogue, and by the 
prophets in the stricter sense, or as a 
matter of the highest prudence, as in the 
Book of Proverbs, or in the Wisdom 
Literature in general. 

Righteousness 

The watchword of Hebrew prophecy 
was righteousness. Those who were 

* Cf. W. D. Hyde. " From Epicurus to Christ," chs. I, and 2. 



40 Christian Conduct 

called to preach it were also given the 
vision of its eternal bearings. They saw 
it grounded in the nature of God and 
they watched its issues in a judgment of 
the ages. If Israel prospered, it was to 
be by righteousness. If the heathen were 
to be brought to nought, it was because 
of their lack of conformity to it. If they 
turned to Jehovah, and took His law as 
their guide, they should be saved by 
righteousness. This is the ethical key to 
the puzzling Book of Jonah, as well as 
the underlying thought of many an ob- 
scure passage in the rest of the Old Testa- 
ment. 

This law is individualized. The right- 
eous one shall be saved by his faithfulness 
(Hab. ii. 4). All the scathing denunciations 
of Amos and Isaiah, all the complaints of 
Ezra and Jeremiah, all the urgent appeals 
of Hosea and Haggai and Zechariah are 
occasioned by the lapse from, or the fail- 
ure to realize, this law of God in private as 
well as in civic life. Old Testament the- 



Christ's Teaching on Conduct 41 

ology with its doctrines of the unity and 
holiness of God, the election of a people 
to be holy, the expression of that holiness 
in a ceremonial system, the Messiah, the 
Remnant, the Great Day of Jehovah, is 
nothing but a series of deductions from 
the central thought of righteousness in 
God and man. 

Jesus takes up the lesson just where 
the prophets left it. He takes it up where 
they found the conditions and their own 
limitations incapacitating them from con- 
tinuing it. He clears the ground, prunes 
off foreign accretions, and infuses a new 
life into the plant. It is true His own 
message and work are more than ethical ; 
but they are ethical before they are any- 
thing more. The Kingdom of God was 
the realization of long cherished ideals of 
a perfect order in which men would deal 
with one another as God would have 
them do, i. e., righteously. Jesus' law 
of conduct is then a continuation, purifica- 
tion and expansion of the law of perfect 



42 Christian Conduct 

righteousness given to Abraham, to 
Moses and the prophets. What was 
dimly seen as a flickering light by the 
earlier of God's messengers was shown 
by Him in its full and constant blaze. In 
this, as in all other parts, of Revelation, 
" God, having of old time spoken unto 
the fathers in the prophets by divers por- 
tions and in divers manners, hath at the 
end of these days spoken unto us in His 
Son " (Heb. i. 1). 



CHAPTER IV 

The Mainspring of Christian 
Conduct. 

/T was said above that the key word of 
Old Testament morality is Right- 
eousness. Righteousness as conduct, 
however, may spring from a perception 
of results. The fact that it produces 
happiness for its votary or that it issues 
in perfection, harmony and beauty of 
character, or that it secures recognition 
and standing among men, or that its op- 
posite is the source of frightful ravages, 
or that there are penalties attached to the 
doing of unrighteousness, may lead to 
its practice. Righteousness may also 

43 



44 Christian Conduct 

spring from a knowledge and genuine 
and spontaneous love of Him who is the 
source of it. The Old Testament had 
given the commandments which should 
yield righteousness, but had not exhibited 
the inner unity and harmony of these 
commandments in any one of these roots. 
One of the points at which Jesus tran- 
scends the Old Testament conception is 
just this idea of morality as a unity, con- 
trolled by one living and moulding prin- 
ciple. 

The Great Commandment 

When the Pharisees incited one of 
their own number, a lawyer, to test 
His knowledge of the Old Testament 
Law, with the question, " Which is the 
great commandment in the law?" He 
promptly answered : " Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 
This is the great and first commandment. 
And a second like unto it is this, Thou 



Its Mainspring 45 

shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On 
these two commandments the whole law 
hangeth and the prophets'' (Matt. xxii. 
35-39). 

These two commandments were quo- 
ted from the Old Testament law, but 
they were taken from different parts of 
it. Under the Old Testament, their 
connection was not apparent. Each in 
its place was recognized as proper and 
effective. It did not seem necessary to 
join them together under one principle. 
Neither was their universal sweep clearly 
seen. "Thou shalt love Jehovah thy 
God" meant the God of thy nation, the 
God who saved thee " out of the land of 
Egypt, out of the house of bondage." 
That the same Jehovah should be the 
object of love for all men of every land 
and every age, the Old Testament saint 
did not realize. " Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself," meant, Thou shalt 
have regard for and do good unto the 
Israelite with whom thou art in daily re- 



46 Christian Conduct 

lation. In the days when national life 
broke up merely local lines of relation- 
ship, and men came into frequent touch 
with strangers, and these presently estab- 
lished themselves in the places of neigh- 
bors, the question, "Who is my neigh- 
bor ? " could not fail to rise and puzzle 
the conscience. In the parallel but 
slightly varying account of Luke (x. 25), 
this question actually follows, with its 
magnificent answer in the parable of the 
True Neighbor, commonly called the 
Good Samaritan. 

That answer means simply that the 
love at the root of conduct must be uni- 
versal. All artificial distinctions must 
melt before it. The Jews were not 
quite ready to have their national prerog- 
atives annulled by such universalism. 
More than this, within the nation, a 
special class had been formed with the 
claim to special privileges before God 
and men. And they based this claim on 
their very relation to the Law. By de- 



Its Mainspring 47 

fining the Law as He did, Jesus put 
Himself into the position of implacable 
hostility to the Pharisaic standpoint. 

Defectiveness of Pharisaic Righteousness 

He declared the Pharisaic ideal to be 
totally inadequate. Quite deliberately 
and dispassionately, He said to His fol- 
owers : " For I say unto you, that ex- 
cept your righteousness shall exceed the 
righteousness of the scribes and Phari- 
sees, ye shall in no wise enter into the 
kingdom of heaven (Matt. v. 20). 

7. It Exalts Human Authority above Di- 
vine 

More particularly, Jesus criticised the 
Pharisaic idea of morality first of all for 
subordinating the divine to human au- 
thority. " Ye leave the commandment 
of God, and hold fast the tradition of 
men." And of this He gave a familiar il- 
lustration. The fifth commandment of 



48 Christian Conduct 

the Decalogue had enjoined in explicit 
terms the rendering of honor to father and 
mother, but the Pharisees taught other- 
wise. " If a man shall say to his father 
or his mother, that wherewith thou 
mightest have been profited by me is 
Corban, that is to say, Given to God, Ye 
no longer suffer him to do aught for his 
father or his mother ; making void the 
word of God by your tradition " (Mark 
vii. 8-13). Here was a case of the mani- 
fest reversal of the intent of the law. 
The law was of divine authority. The 
tradition which annuls it was of human 
origin ; and yet when it came to a choice 
between the two, the preference was 
given to the human rather than the di- 
vine. Such tampering with conscience 
as this involved would only result in the 
deadening of the moral nature. 

II. Prefers External to Internal Elements 

Another point at which Jesus found 
the current ideal defective was its prefer- 



Its Mainspring 49 

ence for the external rather than the in- 
ternal. The moral law is a mere abstrac- 
tion if it do not issue in outward 
application. And in the application of 
it outwardly, questions must necessarily 
arise. A strong, healthy nature will 
answer these questions for itself \ but the 
weak have always clamored for prescrip- 
tions, defining the law in detail, and 
making it unnecessary for them to grapple 
with these questions. It was this that 
led to the formation of the so-called 
Hedge of the Law. The Hedge was 
nothing but a series of precepts covering 
every imaginable combination of circum- 
stances that may arise. It aimed to ex- 
ternalize the spirit, of the law, and 
render its observance or violation easy of 
discernment. 

In a certain way, the Hedge accom- 
plished its purpose. The multitude of its 
prescriptions could be easily grasped ; 
they were outward rules. As a matter 
of inner right, for instance, the law pro- 

D 



50 Christian Conduct 

vided for the payment of tithes, but it 
was not easy to decide what sort of prod- 
ucts should be tithed. So many of 
them appeared to be too insignificant or 
too much aside from the main channels 
of life for the law to take notice of them. 
The Rabbis undertook to say just what 
the law meant to cover in this respect. 
Garden herbs, such as mint, anise and 
cummin must be tithed. The difficulty 
was removed. The plain man could now 
observe the law as to tithes, without puz- 
zling his mind. But the process by 
which the difficulty was removed raised 
an external and subordinate matter to the 
level of the internal and primary matters 
of " judgment and the love of God." No 
sooner raised to this level, however, the 
external, from the nature of the case, 
overshadowed and eclipsed the internal. 
The weightier matters were completely 
lost sight of. Men were so busy about 
making " clean the outside of the cup 
and platter " that they could not perceive 



Its Mainspring 51 

that their " inward parts were being filled 
with ravening and wickedness/' 

///. Deprives Morality of Motive 

Akin to the criticism for laying undue 
emphasis on the outward, is that for de- 
priving the moral of its true significance 
by ignoring the motive and fixing upon 
the performance of action as the alone 
sufficient thing ; or, worse still, upon its 
performance from selfish and unworthy 
motives. In either case, morality ceases 
to exist. If good is done perfunctorily, 
it has no ethical character and value ; it 
has settled to the level of mechanical 
action. If it is done from other than 
the motive furnished by conscience, it is 
not the offspring of the moral nature, 
but of the intellectual. It becomes a 
matter of calculation and self-interest. 
The state of things which Jesus found 
partook of both of these evils. Men 
obeyed the law either perfunctorily (the 
common people), or from love of osten- 



52 Christian Conduct 

tation (the more zealous Pharisees). In 
both cases, they deserved rebuke and 
correction. 

IV. Multiplies Precepts 

Still another fault of the moral system 
of the Pharisees was its breaking into a 
vast multitude of disconnected precepts. 
Behind this feature, there was doubt- 
less the laudable desire to be exhaustive. 
Every portion of the law must be care- 
fully guarded with rules, making it im- 
possible for the loyal Israelite to trans- 
gress it. But the result was a burden- 
some code with an enormous number 
of specifications, impossible to grasp 
and hold in the mind. It is to this 
that Jesus refers when He speaks of the 
Pharisees as binding " heavy burdens and 
grievous to be borne and laying them 
on men's shoulders" (Matt, xxiii. 4). 
Evidently, the only remedy for this state 
of things was to sum up the whole moral 
system in one great principle ; and Jesus 



Its Mainspring 53 

does this in the Law of Love with its two 
phases, the Godward and the manward. 

The Righteousness of the Kingdom 

Over against the righteousness which 
is inadequate, Jesus places the righteous- 
ness of God (Matt. vi. 33). It is the 
great and ultimate aim of the disciple to 
approve himself a worthy child of the 
Father who is in heaven. To this end, 
he must begin by knowing God aright. 
For only in the character of God will he 
find a normal expression of the law of 
right conduct for himself. His righteous- 
ness must be the same in its principle and 
pattern as the righteousness of God. 
The phrase itself, "righteousness of 
God," is liable to be misunderstood, be- 
cause it is used by the Apostle Paul in a 
slightly different sense. It is not, how- 
ever, on that account to be assumed as 
not used by Jesus at all. It certainly ex- 
presses His genuine thought and sets it 
over against the teaching of the rabbis of 



54 Christian Conduct 

His day. They conceived of God as a 
lawgiver, and of man's relation to Him as 
essentially a legal one. Obedience out 
of proper regard for or without proper 
regard to the personal element in the 
case was the essence of righteousness. 
Jesus' conception of God as Father in- 
volved the retirement of law into the 
background because of the more potent 
and effective consciousness of the filial 
relation. Therefore this view yields 
better fruit. It achieves all that respect 
for law aims at and much more. Moral- 
ity is to do the will of God and God is 
the Father. 

But if the consciousness of filial relation 
lies at the root of the moral life, the 
moving and shaping force of it can be 
nothing less than the principle of love, 
and so we return to Jesus' enunciation of 
the Great Commandment (Matt. xxii. 
35-39). The mainspring of all conduct 
must be love. 

Love is not a virtue among other vir- 



Its Mainspring 55 

tues, but the spirit and life of all the vir- 
tues. In a certain aspect of it, love is 
broader than righteousness. Yet practi- 
cally the two conceptions are coextensive. 
Even if it be not true to say, love is right- 
eousness, it is correct to say, righteousness 
is the expression of love. It would be 
quite possible, and in fact an easy task, 
were it not entirely superfluous, to show 
by an exhaustive examination of the teach- 
ings of Jesus that every one of them rec- 
ognizes the centering of all good around 
the vital point of love. Pure abstract 
good may exist in reality, but Jesus leaves 
it out of account in His ideal of conduct. 

Inwardness of Morality : Spontaneity of 
Conduct 

The qualities of morality which Jesus 
inculcates are, therefore, lofty ideality in 
combination with regard for common, 
practical ends. First, and above all else, 
this morality is a spontaneous outgrowth. 
Commonly, this feature of it is called in- 



56 Christian Conduct 

wardness. So far as the term refers to 
the fact that Jesus finds the seat of merit 
and demerit not in the outward action 
but in the inner thought or feeling from 
which the action springs, it is truly de- 
scriptive. Moreover, it distinguishes the 
ideal of Jesus from the Pharisaic ideal, 
which, as already shown, lays undue stress 
on mere outward observances. But if in- 
wardness is to be understood as pointing 
back to a hidden source within man, a 
mysterious something beneath the surface 
that cannot be probed, it were better to 
set the term aside and use the word spon- 
taneity instead. 

It must be clearly understood, how- 
ever, that spontaneity is not causelessness, 
but rather naturalness and freedom from 
constraint from without. Moral conduct 
is from this aspect of it not mechanical 
obedience to an external law, but the glad 
expression of a willing spirit. Compliance 
to the will of God makes up the essence 
of spontaneous loving righteousness. 



Its Mainspring 57 

Freedom 

Spontaneity, moreover, means not 
merely inwardness or freedom from ex- 
ternal restraint, but also positive ability to 
determine one's own moral course. Jesus 
would have His disciples decide the ques- 
tions of conscience for themselves, without 
asking for authoritative pronouncements 
by rabbis, whether living or ancient. Help 
from external sources is not only permis- 
sible, but may be in given circumstances 
even necessary. But the gulf between 
help and authority must be always held 
as impassable. Where love does its per- 
fect work, it may contribute to others 
the light necessary for the better under- 
standing of ways and means, and the bet- 
ter expression of self, but it will not be at a 
loss as to whether it shall give vent or not. 
It is only fear that seeks for human au- 
thority to prescribe to it its narrow path. 

When this principle is fully understood, 
no difficulty will be felt with reference 



58 Christian Conduct 

to the independent attitude which Jesus 
assumed and imparted to His disciples in 
all matters pertaining to the outward 
practices of fasting and prayer, of cere- 
monial purifications and abstinences, and 
of the observance of Sabbatic times and 
seasons. These practices are, to be sure, 
more ceremonial than moral ; and yet 
the principle involved in them is equally 
applicable to the moral sphere. It means 
that Jesus aims at the development of a 
self-directed power in His follower. 

Breadth 

With freedom, the moral ideal of Je- 
sus introduces the element of breadth. 
Righteousness is not merely the keeping 
of one's self free from blame for doing 
some things, but also for leaving undone 
certain others. Where any other motive 
than that of love rules, neglect and omis- 
sions will be natural and frequent. To 
scrupulous but loveless Pharisees, who 
punctiliously observed the requirements 






Its Mainspring 59 

of an external law, but overlooked the 
subtler and spiritual obligations of life, 
Jesus said, " These ought ye to have done 
and not to leave the other undone." His 
ethical ideal was comprehensive of all of 
man's conduct. The little and insignifi- 
cant things like the tithing of anise, mint 
and cummin, as well as the great and 
momentous things of righteousness and 
the love of God must be included, and 
will be, where the disciple is moved by 
the true motive and takes God's desire as 
his rule. There is no sphere or depart- 
ment of human life into which the subtle 
element of love may not penetrate and 
infuse its power. Hence the outward 
and inner man, the acts of ritual or spirit- 
ual nature, of Godward or manward di- 
rection can and must all be pervaded and 
governed by it if the ethical ideal of Jesus 
shall be realized. All relations, whether 
to the world of nature, to men or to God, 
must be sanctified and vitalized by its uni- 
versal and pervasive sway. 



CHAPTER V 

The Comprehensive Rule of Conduct : 
The Golden Rule. 

rHERE is another statement of 
duty besides the Great Command- 
ment to which Jesus attaches the 
expression " This is the law and the 
prophets." It is the Golden Rule.* 
We pass by all critical discussions such as 
Ewald's contention that this verse is mis- 
placed and should have occurred after 
v. 44. The difference between the two 
summaries of the law and the prophets 
is the difference between the principle 
and the rule. The one presents the 

*Matt. vii. 12. 

60 



The Golden Rule 61 

essence and life, the other the form of 
the same thing. 

Originality of the Golden Rule 

As pertaining to the form and body 
rather than to the spirit and life of the 
moral law, the Golden Rule must take a 
secondary place. It does not give the 
thought of Jesus at its highest and best. 
It was customary to claim upon this 
point that in the gift of the Golden Rule 
to His disciples and to the world, Jesus 
had made the most valuable contribu- 
tion to the moral progress of the human 
race. As against this position, it was 
claimed on the other side that the same 
truth had been taught long before the 
days of Jesus by others.* As a matter of 
fact more than one parallel to the Gold- 
en Rule has been pointed out in heathen 
literature, f 

*Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. 54, n. 

t Confucius taught, " Do not to others what you do not wish 
done to yourself" (Legge, Chinese Classics, i iQ2f.) Isocrates 
advises," What ye resent when suffering at the hands of others, 



62 Christian Conduct 

To meet the implications of these paral- 
lels, the counterclaim has been set up that 
whereas in them the law is stated in a neg- 
ative form, it was put by Jesus on its ag- 
gressive and positive side. If Confucius 
said : " Do not do to others what you 
would not wish done to yourself/' it was 
because of his rudimentary conception of 
a principle which Jesus grasps and gives 
in its fullness and maturity. This is per- 
fectly true. There is a marked difference 
between the parallels. But should it af- 
fect our ideas of the originality of Jesus 
if we were to discover that the law had 
been enunciated even in its positive form ? 
We cannot think so. The originality of 
Jesus does not consist in teaching pre- 

do not do to others "( Nicocl, 12): The Stoic maxim was " Quod 
tibi fieri, non vis alteri non f eceris." A familiar story has it 
that an inquirer demanded of Shammai to be taught the Law 
while he stood on one foot. Shammai sent him away with 
indignation. He went to Hillel and made the same request. 
With keener insight, this teacher promptly replied : " What- 
soever thou wouldest that men should not do to thee, that do 
not thou to them. All our Law is summed up in this saying. 
All the rest is only comment upon it." 



The Golden Rule 63 

cepts never heard by men previously, but 
in revealing the true nature of God. His 
life in the world, His claim to be obeyed 
perfectly, and His gracious purpose to- 
wards those who having failed to do their 
best might still come to Him for forgive- 
ness and strength for a new endeavor. 
Originality does not consist in bringing 
into existence new materials of thought, 
but in infusing a new life into those al- 
ready at hand. And Christ the revela- 
tion of God does transform all the golden 
rules ever taught by others into a new 
law. 

Distinctiveness of Jesus' Form of It 

Nevertheless, the Golden Rule, as 
given by Jesus, is a far more vital and 
vitalizing guide to conduct than its pre- 
decessors. Lurking in its background, 
there lies the thought of a motive power. 
If it makes no mention of the law of 
love, it assumes it as at the root of the 
conduct it prescribes. Had Jesus never 



64 Christian Conduct 

spoken a single word regarding the 
springs of all action in love, this reading 
of the motive in the background might 
have been called unwarranted ; but in 
view of the fact that He called the law 
of love the sum and substance of the an- 
cient law and the prophets, and further, 
in view of the fact that He lived and 
died in conformity to a richer and larger 
conception than the measure of doing to 
others as He would have had others do 
to Himself, it is perfectly legitimate to 
read the Golden Rule as His conception 
of what conduct should be in the con- 
crete, when it is actuated by the love He 
shows as necessary to all true sonship of 
God. 

The Essential Element in It 

The pith of the Golden Rule is the 
principle of mutualism. It recognizes 
the necessity of social relations, and the 
equality of the related parts in the social 
organism. The temptation in social life 



The Golden Rule 65 

is to regard self as the center, and all that 
ministers to self as proper and right. For 
all things this temptation holds out one 
end and aim, self. All other things or 
persons are mere means. The gospel of 
altruism, at least in some of its forms, 
goes to the opposite extreme. It re- 
duces self to a means and other persons 
and things (as in Buddhism) to ends. 
The Golden Rule is the golden mean be- 
tween natural utilitarianism and Utopian 
altruism. It regards all personality as an 
end in itself. Kant gave expression to 
the truth embodied in it when he said : 
" So act as to treat humanity, whether in 
your own person, or in that of another, 
in every case as an end, and never as a 
means only." 

The Golden Rule is, therefore, the 
necessary solvent of all social complica- 
tions. Without a considerable obser- 
vance of it, society becomes a hard thing 
to move. If it were to cease being re- 
garded altogether, society must come to 



66 Christian Conduct 

a standstill. It is like air to sound. If 
the air becomes thin, as in the upper 
strata of the atmosphere, sound becomes 
faint; and when perfect vacuum is 
reached, sound is impossible. Its neces- 
sity is so manifest, that one does not 
wonder at its being discovered before 
Christ's day. 

The Golden Rule is the expression of 
all genuine sympathy. To put one's self 
in the place of another, is to feel as he 
does and to feel with him ; and to feel 
with him is to rouse in one's self the mo- 
tives which will treat him as one would 
treat one's self, or would have one's self 
treated. If one would turn a sensitive 
ear unto his own heart, he would hear 
there the pleadings c?f the claims of 
others. 

The Golden Rule in Operation 

But sympathy is a feeling. Its spon- 
taneous rise may be encouraged or re- 
pressed. In any case, it is in need of 



The Golden Rule 67 

guidance and control; and the Golden 
Rule is intended to furnish its guide. 
First of all, it does not touch those cases 
in which the good of others or their ill 
are not dependent upon the action of self. 
In such cases sympathy may exist, but it 
can only result at most in a bare expres- 
sion in word or deed. Secondly, where 
action is called for, more than the mere 
expression of sympathy is demanded by 
the rule, in fact nothing less than the 
wisest and kindest action. The mere 
impulse moving along the line of the 
least resistance would often dictate that 
which is pleasing to the other. But the 
rule demands what is most profitable. 
Mere sympathy for instance would lead 
to the bestowment of help directly ; a 
wise regard for the highest welfare of the 
person to be helped would suggest the 
special kind of help which would render 
him able to help himself. 

One would not wish for flattery for 
himself where criticism would be more 



68 Christian Conduct 

beneficial ; one would not wish a gratuity 
where the opportunity to earn by work- 
ing would be of much greater benefit in 
the long run ; one would not wish a 
meretricious reputation for virtue or ca- 
pability where the unvarnished statement 
of facts would prove of more lasting value. 
Therefore, in practicing the Golden Rule 
one is called upon not to regard the pass- 
ing comfort of pleasure, but the perma- 
nent well-being of his neighbor. 

But suppose the neighbor is blind and 
blunt and incapable of wishing the things 
that one sees plainly to be the best ? 
That has nothing to do with one's action. 
It is not what the other would desire, 
but what one would desire with the bet- 
ter light which he possesses for himself 
were he in the place of the other that 
one must promote. Whatever wisdom 
and kindness one has gathered that is over 
and above the others, he is to put at the 
service of the other. 

The distinction between want and wish 



The Golden Rule 69 

may help to throw light on the subject. 
It is not what the other wishes, but what 
he wants ; it is not what one wants to do, 
but what one would wish to have done 
for himself in the same circumstances 
that is prescribed as his duty. 

But is this not the same as the law of 
love ? Does it not amount to loving one's 
neighbor as one's self ? It is, but with a 
difference. And the difference consists 
in this, that the law of love underlies the 
rule of conduct. If one is possessed by 
the law of neighborly love as defined by 
Christ, he will practice the Golden Rule. 
If he fails to practice the rule, it will be 
because his love is defective. If he prac- 
tice the rule without the underlying and 
actuating motive of love, his obedience 
will not be Christian ; it will scarcely rise 
to the level of the ethical. In other 
words, the law of love gives us a principle, 
the Golden Rule shows the practical 
working of that principle. 

The effect of the observance of the 



70 Christian Conduct 

Golden Rule cannot but lead to some- 
thing more than a cold moralism. And 
this is the difference between Christian 
and non-Christian ethics. In the one, 
altruism and even mutualism, are purely 
expediential, in the other all conduct 
springs from an inexhaustible fountain- 
head. In the one, the moment it ceases 
to be expedient to treat others right, 
right conduct loses its force ; in the other 
it always remains valid. Not only so, 
but it educates toward a higher and a 
purer character. 



CHAPTER VI 

Self-Culture. 

rHE great principle of regard for 
personality as an end in itself calls 
attention not only to those with 
whom one finds himself in social relations, 
but to one's self also. This is implicit in 
the Law of Love, as framed and expressed 
in both of the utterances of Jesus just 
considered. The law of love to one's 
neighbor sets up a standard of measure- 
ment. " Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself." That takes for granted, of 
course, that one love one's self. Neither 
the Old Testament nor any other system 

7i 



72 Christian Conduct 

of morals knows of a specific command- 
ment, " Thou shalt love thyself/' 

On the contrary, paradoxically enough, 
the neglect and even the apparently un- 
loving treatment of one's self have often 
been inculcated as moral excellencies. 
The reasons for this are not far to seek. 
Human nature stands in no need of the 
exhortation to self-regard. It is rather 
sorely in need of restraints and limitations 
to its natural tendencies in that direction. 

The Care of Self Provided for in Human 
Nature 

Through a wise provision in the human 
constitution, the care of self is abundantly 
secured by means of a series of imperative 
instincts and appetites. So strong are 
these that the problem of the welfare, and 
even of the existence, both of the indi- 
vidual and of society depends upon their 
proper regulation and control. Less 
compelling they could not have been 
made without the risk of failing to ac- 



Self-Culture 73 

complish their end, i e., self-preservation 
and race-preservation. More lively they 
could not have been made without de- 
feating their own end. But being such 
as they are, they demand not a general 
commandment, " Thou shalt love thy- 
self, " but a series of ideals which will 
lead to their use without abuse. 

The need for such restraining ideals 
has been universally recognized and will 
be, in spite of occasional protests against 
them, like that of Friedrich Nietzche in 
our own days. To what extent it was 
Jesus' thought that the appetites and in- 
stincts should be restrained is to be ascer- 
tained from a careful examination of all 
His utterances. It would be quite easy 
to take isolated sayings and interpret 
them * in the light of certain ideas and 
practices current in a limited and local 
way in His own day, and thus make Jesus 
appear an advocate of asceticism. This 

* An instance can be pointed out in the case of Origen and 
his misinterpretation of Matt. xix. 12. 



74 Christian Conduct 

has indeed been done in a rather thor- 
oughgoing way. 

Self-Realization, a Duty 

The sum and essence of a complete 
view of Jesus' thought regarding one's 
duty to himself is that, as a child of God, 
every human being should give due at- 
tention to the development of all his 
powers and capacities, physical, intellec- 
tual and spiritual, in accordance with the 
relative importance of each as a part or 
aspect of the whole man. 

Self-Knowledge the First Step in Self- 
Culture 

This involves first of all the duty of 
self-knowledge. Jesus did not use the 
language of the ancient schools ; but His 
meaning is just as plain on this point as if 
among His sayings there had been pre- 
served something similar to the Delphic 
" Know thyself/' which Socrates was so 
fond of repeating. No one can rise to 



Self-Culture 75 

the sphere of privilege revealed by the 
Master without coming to appreciate at 
the same time something of his own pos- 
sibilities, and of the estimate which God 
Himself puts upon him. What has been 
said of Jesus' view of human nature as a 
presupposition of His ethical teaching 
must become in some measure or form 
the individual Christian's view of him- 
self. 

Self-Discovery 

Standing upon this platform, we may 
say that Jesus is not only the revealer of 
God to man, but also of man to himself. 
Indeed, He could not be the one without 
being the other in the same fact. If He 
was to reveal God the Father, He must 
reveal also man the child. The revelation 
is a revelation of relation, and both terms 
must come into light if it shall be com- 
plete and effective for its purposes. In 
the parable of the Prodigal, the lost son 
first " comes to himself/' He finds him- 



76 Christian Conduct 

self, /. e., comes to realize who he is, 
what he might have been, and what he 
may still be. The step of self-discovery 
is so inherently necessary that it cannot 
be regarded as forcing the parable to find 
it pictured in this feature of the prodigal's 
imaged experience. 

Self-Study 

But it is more than a self-discovery that 
man needs. What is discovered must be 
appreciated. The duty of self-knowledge 
must result in self-study. Human nature 
is a complex and ever-changing subject. 
It does not show its whole content at the 
moment of discovery. It can neither be 
grasped at a single glance in one act of 
self-discovery, nor can' it be held in a 
steadfast and continuous view, like an im- 
movable picture fixed upon canvas once 
for all. The depths and variations of the 
soul's life must be constantly and closely 
kept under scrutiny. In a sense, the dic- 
tum " the proper study of mankind is 



Self-Culture 77 

man " expresses a genuine thought of 
Jesus. 

This sort of self-study will be at once 
recognized as a very different thing from 
the morbid introspection sometimes prac- 
ticed and commended in the history of 
Christianity. It is not a self-examination 
which looks for and terminates with the 
finding of the evil in the heart, and thus 
fills one with gloom and despair ; nor is it 
the self-examination that pulls up each 
growing good impulse by the roots in 
order to ascertain how much vitality it has 
gained. It is rather that calm and sober 
appreciation of capacities and tendencies 
which culminates in a healthy self-esteem 
in general. 

The child of the honorable parent, no 
matter how severely he may reproach 
himself for falling into low habits and 
keeping company with unworthy persons, 
must have with the returning sense of his 
high birth, a correct appreciation of his 
dignity. He must know the difference 



78 Christian Conduct 

between what he ought to be and what 
he is. And to know this difference is to 
honor his own ideal self, and to attempt 
to realize it. 

" Could'st thou in vision see 
The man that God hath meant 
Thyself, thou would' st not be 
The man thou art content." 

Self-Mastery 

But self-knowledge is not complete 
until it has passed into self-mastery. It 
would, in fact, be a source of unhappi- 
ness if it were nothing more than the 
consciousness of powers and conditions 
within, which one could not bend and 
utilize, whose victim and slave one must 
therefore remain. Whatever else a person 
may not be able to control, he can con- 
trol himself ; he can grasp the reins of his 
powers and tendencies with a firm hand 
and direct them into the paths of his 
own choice ; if driven to the last re- 
sort, he can " cut off and cast from " him- 



Self-Culture 79 

self an offending part ; he can cause the 
polluting stream of " evil thoughts, mur- 
ders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false 
witnesses, railings " to dry up within his 
heart. Of the virtue which modern 
Christendom calls temperance, either in 
its narrower sense, as abstinence from in- 
toxicants, or in its older and broader sense 
of pure self-control, Jesus does not dis- 
course extensively. An occasional allu- 
sion to drunkenness, among other evils, 
shows that He held this form of sin as 
much in abhorrence as others. But His 
whole view of conduct is based on a 
theory of self-mastery which must inevi- 
tably lead to temperance in all its senses. 

A Sense of Proportion in Estimating Differ- 
ent Elements in Self 

Another duty growing from the com- 
plexity of human nature is the relative 
and proportionate estimating of its differ- 
ent parts and powers. They are not all 
of equal importance. There is that in 



So Christian Conduct 

man which is worth more than the whole 
world, at least to himself : " For what 
shall a man be profited if he shall gain 
the whole world and forfeit his life ? Or 
what shall a man give in exchange for his 
life " *(Matt. xvi. 26). And there is that in 
him with which he can dispense if nec- 
essary (Matt. v. 29). His aim should be 
undoubtedly to preserve himself com- 
plete. All his powers are talents (the use 
of the word " talent " as the equivalent 
of power or "faculty," though of late 
origin, is quite true to the thought of 
Jesus) which he must use and develop. 
But if in the stress of the conflict he 
should lose or find it necessary to suppress 
or discard one in order that the rest of 
his manhood may be preserved, and put 
to the best use, he is acting both faith- 
fully and wisely. Jesus' appeal is always 

* It makes little difference for our purposes whether the 
word " soul " is retained here with the A. V., or the more cor- 
rect " life " of the R. V. be accepted. The main point is that 
there is in man that which is incomparable in value to any- 
thing else. 



Self-Culture 81 

to the personality as a whole and in be- 
half of the personality as a whole. 

The sense of proportion necessary in 
the distribution of self-regard He shows 
only in its most general bearing. Its 
special applications must be adjusted in 
harmony with the general principle 
pointed out. The bodily life and the 
inner life are the two specially contrasted. 
The Kingdom of God, whether regarded 
as the sudden appearance upon earth in 
an apocalyptic fashion of the divine reign 
with its heavenly hierarchy of officers, or 
as a gradual evolution through natural 
processes and stages, of a moral dispensa- 
tion, is of vastly more importance than 
mere earthly welfare. Its bearings are 
eternal ; therefore, it is the first thing to 
be sought. All other things will be 
added to him who is absorbed in seeking 
for it. 

Care for Bodily Needs 
And care of the body may be relegated 



82 Christian Conduct 

into the place of secondary importance 
all the more cheerfully because there is 
abundant provision made for it in the wise 
orderings of nature itself, which is noth- 
ing but the workmanship of the heavenly 
Father. " Is not the life more than the 
food, and the body than the raiment?" 
(Matt. vi. 25 f . ) It is hardly necessary to 
repeat the commonplace remark that 
there is no intention here to encourage 
idleness, recklessness or fanaticism. It is 
not labor and prudence that are depre- 
cated. These are a part of the equip- 
ment of the world ; through them the 
heavenly Father supplies the needs of 
His creatures. Even " the fowls of the 
air " and "the lilies of the fields/' though 
" they sow not, neither do they reap, nor 
gather into barns ;" though "they toil 
not, neither do they spin," yet do each that 
which is appointed as the proper means 
for attaining to the end held in view for 
them by the Father which is in heaven. 
None of them would be fed or clothed 



Self-Culture 83 

with glory greater than Solomon's if some 
work were not lavished on them some- 
where by creature agencies. It was not 
the due use of forethought, but the un- 
due exaltation of the secondary to the 
level of the primary concerns of life that 
Jesus designed to rebuke through His 
words in this connection. He who seeks 
first the Kingdom of God will find it easy 
to gain through the means appointed 
thereto the other necessary things. 

But what a meaning is added by mod- 
ern scientific knowledge to these words 
of Jesus about the part of God in the 
arrangements and provisions of the uni- 
verse. Life with its infinite variety and 
complication, and in its inextricably intri- 
cate adjustments is seen in the light of 
physical and biological research to require 
a care nothing short of divine. To him 
who has the confidence that it is his 
Father's house, the world will be fuller 
of interest and each of its provisions the 
more reassuring because of that confi- 



84 Christian Conduct 

dence. While we may not cease to care 
for the health and welfare of the body, 
he will not waste his precious life on 
worrying about these matters. 

The supreme element, however, in 
self-regard, is the culture and full realiza- 
tion of the true self, the heavenly element 
in man which allies him to eternity. 
Jesus has much to say of this. But as 
this self rises into the eternal sphere, the 
teaching of Jesus about it also passes from 
the ethical to the spiritual, from the 
sphere of conduct to the sphere of the 
inner life. There it may be left to be 
studied more appropriately. 



CHAPTER VII 

The Sabbath. 

Tr WHATEVER may have been the 
if If understanding of the ancient 
Hebrew about the origin and 
design of the Sabbath, it cannot be reason- 
ably questioned that the observance of 
the commandment resulted in a high 
type of self-culture. The fourth com- 
mandment by its very phraseology aims 
at two good things, first, rest from rou- 
tine and drudgery, and second, touch with 
the sphere of the infinite and eternal. 
The latter of these brings as an inevitable 
consequence the deepening and enlarg- 
ing of the idea of holiness. As the idea 

85 



86 Christian Conduct 

of holiness is in the Old Testament the 
inseparable correlate of divinity, to sanc- 
tify anything is to consecrate it to God, 
and use it as He wills ; or in other words, 
to honor Him through it. To hallow a 
portion of time can, then, only mean so 
to use it as to do honor to God and be- 
come partaker in His holiness. This 
part of the Sabbath law thus passes into 
the inner life. 

The other side of the good aimed at 
by the fourth commandment is more ex- 
ternal. It is secured through the cessa- 
tion for a while of those activities that 
wear and tear, and the opportunity to re- 
plenish and repair the wasted energies. 
So patent is the benefit of rest that 
thoughtful men of all, schools and types 
have never failed to admire and praise the 
provision for it found in this elemental 
law of the Old Testament moral code. 

The Sabbath under the Old Testament 
In the nature of the case, the provi- 



The Sabbath 87 

sions made in the Old Testament for the 
securing of the advantages of the Sabbath 
laws were minute and prescriptive. It 
could not have been otherwise. The de- 
gree of progress in intellectual and moral 
ideas was not compatible with anything 
less than a system of detailed directions 
intended to safeguard the institution of 
the Sabbath and guarantee its benevolent 
operation. The analogies of all other 
spheres of life called for these statutory 
provisions. But for these the law must 
dissolve into a vague tradition and vanish 
away. 

Rabbinical Sabbath-Legislation 

It was intended undoubtedly that as 
intelligence and moral vigor were devel- 
oped, a freer use of the privileges of the 
law of rest should take the place of these 
detailed prescriptions ; that individual 
judgment should be trusted to adapt this 
means of moral and spiritual culture to 
individual needs. But the course of 



88 Christian Conduct 

events took exactly the opposite turn. 
Instead of a freer, there prevailed a more 
burdensome Sabbath law. Rabbinical 
ingenuity found here a favorite ground 
for its inventiveness. The Talmud con- 
tains a whole tractate, twenty-four chap- 
ters in length, entitled " The Sabbath/' in 
which these prescriptions are elaborated 
into wearisome minutiae. An ass might 
not be led out on the road with its cover- 
ing on unless such had been put on the 
animal previous to the Sabbath ; but it 
was lawful to lead the animal about in 
this fashion in one's own courtyard. The 
same rule applied to a pack-saddle pro- 
vided it was not fastened by girth or 
backstraps.* 

Instead of a help, the Sabbath law was 
made a burden. And the strange thing 
about it is that the burdensomeness of 
these regulations was felt and confessed 
even by the rabbis themselves. Com- 

Cf Edersheim, Life and Ti?nes of Jesus the Messiah, vol. ii, 
App. xvii. 



The Sabbath 89 

menting upon the above-mentioned regu- 
lation, one of them is reported as burst- 
ing into the indignant exclamation that 
" such laws were like mountains sus- 
pended by a hair." Jesus in a series of 
inevitable controversies (Matt. xii. llff. ; 
Mark ii. 26 ft. ; Luke vi. 9 ; xiii. 3, 14 ; 
Johnviii. 22) recalled His followers from 
them to the primitive principle and design 
of the law. The pith of His thought is 
given in the declaration : " The Sab- 
bath was made for man, and not man for 
the Sabbath, so that the Son of man is 
Lord even of the Sabbath" (Mark ii. 27, 
28). 

Man needs the Sabbath 

This means in the first place that man 
needs the Sabbath. It is not an arbitrary 
enactment designed to torment him or 
to test his obedience, but a beneficent 
provision to help him to the fullest real- 
ization of what is best in himself. There 
may be commandments of God which 



90 Christian Conduct 

must be simply obeyed with the implicit 
faith which asks not why, and takes it 
for granted that the Heavenly Father has 
ordained all things in love. But the 
Sabbath commandment is not one of 
these. Its reason is not only rooted in 
the needs of human nature, but becomes 
apparent without a very long and labori- 
ous search. 

In fact the Sabbath law is exactly on 
the same basis as the other nine com- 
mandments of the Decalogue, so far as in- 
herent grounds for their existence are 
concerned. The only difference between 
it and them is that they are readier to 
show the good they are meant to accom- 
plish, while the beneficence of the Sab- 
bath law, though not , hard to discover, 
does require some study and experience 
to make itself felt. In the last analysis, 
however, the law of rest can no more be 
violated with impunity than the laws of 
respect for life, property, truth and chaste 
relations between the sexes. 



The Sabbath 91 

Sabbath Observance Adaptable to 
Changing Conditions 

Secondly, if the Sabbath law is rooted 
in a human need and its observance re- 
sults in good to man, it follows that the 
manner of its observance must depend 
on the form that this need may take from 
time to time. The perfect keeping of 
the Sabbath law is a matter of adaptation 
to conditions. Under the Old Testa- 
ment, conditions demanded a rather ex- 
tensive code of statutory provisions with 
severe penalties attached to violation. 
Under the New, the conditions are more 
favorable for a freer, and, to employ a 
philosophical word, a more teleological 
use of the law. 

It will not be necessary here to enter 
into the question whether Jesus Himself 
commanded the change of the day from 
the seventh to the first of the week. It 
is nearly certain that He did not. But it 
is sufficient to point out that if the change 



92 Christian Conduct 

ministers to the need which the Sabbath 
law is designed to meet more effectively 
than the preservation of the original day 
of the week, then it is more than justified. 
But who will deny that for the disciple 
of Jesus Christ, the risen Redeemer, it 
must necessarily minister more abundantly 
by putting him in touch with the great 
historical fact of his Saviour's triumph 
over the last great enemy ? 

Change in Method of Sabbath Observance 
not Unlimited 

Does this view of the Sabbath give 
men too much freedom with a divine or- 
dinance ? Does it seem to reduce a great 
and fundamental law into a matter of 
mere convenience ? In answer it may be 
said that the range of freedom given by 
Jesus, though absolute from one point 
of view, is practically limited and ade- 
quately safeguarded. If the Sabbath was 
made for man and man remains essentially 
the same, the manner of its helping him 



The Sabbath 93 

cannot change very much. In fact the 
changes in the means that minister to man 
at any part of his being cannot be very 
radical. If man's body, for instance, needs 
a fixed quantity of starchy and nitrogenous 
foods, he will not be obeying the law of 
his being if he depart very far from the 
habit of using these elements of nourish- 
ment. Neither will he be justified if he 
should complain that his freedom is not 
real when he finds that he cannot extend 
the variety and range of his diet so as to 
include minerals and metals. But within 
the range prescribed by nature, he may 
move with a considerable freedom, and 
command the elements to support and 
strengthen him. The principle applies to 
the case of the Sabbath law. Though set 
free from prescription and allowed to 
adapt it to his spiritual as well as physical 
and intellectual health and welfare, man is 
not set free from the obligation of using 
the Sabbath for his edification and re- 
freshment in accordance with the dictates 



94 Christian Conduct 

of the highest wisdom, as reached in the 
experience of his fellow beings. 

The Social Element in Sabbath-Observance 

There is, moreover, a social element in 
the observance of the Sabbath law which 
cannot very well be neglected. Though 
the benefits of the Sabbath observance 
must come to the individual as he observes 
it, yet the observance is from the nature 
of the case made either more or less ef- 
fective as a means towards this end accord- 
ing as men undertake it in harmony with 
one another, or at cross purposes. It is as 
a law of the Kingdom ; and the King (the 
Son of man) is Lord even of the Sabbath. 
But if it be affected by the fact that men 
must live in society, a certain element of 
conventionalism necessarily enters into 
the practical working of it. What one 
might have a right to do or not to do if 
he were alone in the world, he might 
find it not only inexpedient but even 
wrong to do or not to do as he came to 



The Sabbath 95 

act with reference to those with whom 
he is cooperating. 

Restatement of the Sabbath-Law 

A very helpful way of stating Jesus' 
thought regarding the Sabbath is to lay 
down the general law that the Christian 
should rest one day out of the seven in 
the week and devote it to the cultivation 
of his spiritual life, that he should do no 
work on it " except works of necessity 
and mercy. " This is clear and easily un- 
derstood. But the pith and essence of 
the matter might be put even better, /. e. y 
more comprehensively and scientifically 
in the formula that whatever promotes 
the spiritual welfare of men, whether 
through ministering to the imperative 
necessities of the body or directly to the 
higher nature may be done. " For the 
Sabbath was made for man and not man 
for the Sabbath." 

In addition to the undisputed sayings 
of Jesus on the Sabbath, the Cambridge 



96 Christian Conduct 

manuscript of the Gospels* contains an 
insertion after Luke vi. 4, as follows : 
" On the same day, having seen one work- 
ing on the Sabbath, he said to him, O 
man, if indeed thou knowest what thou 
doest, blessed art thou; but if thou 
knowest not, thou art accursed, and a 
transgressor of the law." Whether, as 
Bishop Westcott says, " the saying must 
rest on some real incident" or not, it shows 
that very early in the history of the Chris- 
tian community, the full meaning of 
Jesus' teaching on the Sabbath began to 
be realized. 

♦Known as Codex D. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Christian in Social Relations. 

/N the Golden Rule, Christ gave a 
comprehensive guide to conduct as 
it might affect others. Men would 
cease to be human, however, if they did 
not need and ask for explanations and il- 
lustrations of a general law. And Jesus 
must have been very much less consider- 
ate of the weakness of His disciples than 
He was had He declined or neglected to 
supply them with these illustrations and 
explanations. 

The Law of Love Concretely Illustrated 

The Sermon on the Mount is indeed 
g 97 



98 Christian Conduct 

nothing more nor less than the answer of 
Jesus to these implicit appeals for light 
upon the practical operation of His fun- 
damental principles. It begins with the 
Beatitudes ; and the Beatitudes show the 
law of love analyzed just as a beam of 
sunlight is analyzed into the colors of the 
spectrum when passed through a prism. 
But the Beatitudes present an ideal citizen 
of the Kingdom of God. In order to 
attain to that ideal, the disciple may have 
to pass through many a perplexing situa- 
tion. Jesus does not hesitate to select 
some typical applications of His principle 
in such puzzling experiences. 

First and most frequent in its recur- 
rence is the question of the treatment of 
personal offences, whether real or imagi- 
nary. They are the most common of the 
violations of love. That the question of 
offences occurred soon after Jesus had 
announced His central and governing 
principle of love, appears from the fact 
that Peter directly asks : " How oft shall 



In Social Relations 99 

my brother sin against me and I forgive 
him ? Until seven times ? " (Matt, xviii. 
21). The query is based upon a measur- 
ably firm grasp of the thought of Jesus. 
But it shows also how novel that thought 
must have appeared to Peter. 

The Law of Retaliation 

But the question shows at the same time, 
how hard it is for those who first heard 
the commandment of love to fathom its 
full depth. They were accustomed to 
a very different ideal under the law of 
retaliation. If must be remembered, 
however, in justice to the ethics of the 
Old Testament, that the law of retaliation 
itself was given not as a means of en- 
couraging the feeling of revenge, but as 
a check and regulator. When one re- 
ceives an injury, the natural propensity is 
to return evil for evil, not according to 
the amount or kind of the injury suffered, 
but without limitation. Anger is a blind- 
ing passion ; it will not calculate. The 



ioo Christian Conduct 

moment one takes time to estimate the 
damage done him and plan to inflict pro- 
portionate damage upon its perpetrator, 
the moment one stops to weigh and 
measure and calculate, that moment he 
furnishes his passions an opportunity to 
evaporate. The lex talionis was designed 
to accomplish this very end. It was 
friendly to justice as against the unjust 
and unmeasured infliction of vengeance 
so natural to the human heart. Hence, 
"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," 
means, Be careful you do not go beyond. 
Justice you may have a right to demand ; 
your pound of flesh you may require and 
have ; but not the smallest fraction of an 
ounce more than the pound shall go with 
it ; not a drop of blood are . you entitled 
to take. 

The Old Testament law of retaliation 
is a vast stride forward from the impulses 
of nature. When men are unprepared 
for the higher principles of Jesus, it is 
found greatly to lessen the savageries and 



In Social Relations 101 

cruelties to which blind passion might 
lead men to give vent. It is in the in- 
terest not only of strict justice but also of 
humanity that it is inserted in the Old 
Testament system. 

From Retaliation to Unlimited Forgiveness 

But the change from unrestrained ven- 
geance to retaliation does not compare in 
its radical character and effects to that 
from retaliation to love. No wonder 
that the disciples were taken aback and 
wished to know exactly how such a 
method of dealing with offences would 
work. Jesus in answer reiterates the 
principle of love with more amplitude 
and emphasis : " I say not unto thee un- 
til seven times seven ; but until seventy 
times seven." "The quality of mercy 
is not strained/ ' Strict justice may mod- 
erate natural inhumanity and make an 
approach toward humanity, but the es- 
sence of godlike humanity goes far be- 
yond strict justice. In this sense it is 



102 Christian Conduct 

the only perfectly humanizing princi- 
ple. 

Reconciliation with a Supposed Offended 
Brother 

The first concrete, though hypotheti- 
cal, case, through which Jesus illustrates 
His principle of love, is that of a sus- 
pected grievance on the part of another. 
" If thou rememberest that thy brother 
hath aught against thee . . ." It may 
be a mere suspicion, it may be a matter 
of common rumor, the brother's feeling 
may be unwarranted, it may lack suffi- 
cient grounds for existence, still if he 
only thinks that it is well founded, it 
breaks the force of loving relations, and 
must not be allowed to stand. And the 
effort to remove it must take precedence 
of everything else. Even on such a 
sacred occasion as religious worship, so 
jealously to be guarded against intrusion, 
if one should call to mind the existence 
of a possible violation of love in his rela- 



In Social Relations 103 

tions, he should not allow the solemnity 
of the religious service to go on, but 
should first have that root of bitterness 
removed. " First, be reconciled to thy 
brother." We cannot but believe that 
this is meant only as an illustration of a 
large class of similar cases. 

Non-Resistance to Evil 

The next case that may be properly 
taken up at this point is that in which ill 
feeling has passed from the stage of a 
lurking suspicion into an open expression, 
where, moreover, the place of its appear- 
ance is not the neighbor's or brother's 
heart, but one's own. This is the reverse 
of the preceding. It is not, " if thy 
brother hath aught against thee," but 
" if thou hast aught against thy brother." 
But like the preceding case, hypotheti- 
cally, it is : " When thy brother has of- 
fended thee " (Matt. v. 39 ft). " Who- 
soever smiteth thee on the right cheek, 
turn to him the other also." What does 



104 Christian Conduct 

Jesus mean by these words ? They seem 
to enjoin the doctrine commonly called 
non-resistance of evil. But when one 
considers the fact that Jesus often ex- 
pressed His thoughts in a vivid and rhe- 
torically exaggerated way, not in the way 
of the pedant ; and when one still fur- 
ther takes into account the fact that He 
did not Himself practice literally what He 
says here (John xviii. 22, 23), the injunc- 
tion can scarcely be taken as intended in 
the cold pedantic way of the letter. 

And after all, it may fairly be ques- 
tioned whether the policy of passive non- 
resistance which has been deduced from 
these words can be made to consist with 
Jesus' cardinal principle of love. Can it 
be the truest and highest form of love to 
encourage a second act of injustice by 
actually turning the other cheek to the 
hardened hand which has already com- 
mitted one act of brutality ? Can it 
further the ends of love to enable one 
who has dishonestly taken a coat to add 



In Social Relations 105 

to his dishonesty a confused notion of a 
distinction between " mine " and " thine " 
by giving to him also one's cloak ? 
Would it help the true and godlike man- 
hood to encourage the parasitic borrower 
by giving him what he asks every time ? 
How could it help to advance brother- 
liness to yield to the selfish and arbitrary 
demand to go a mile by going with him 
two ? 

Nay, as against these absurd extremes, 
one may very well say that it is possible 
to do exactly the opposite of what the 
words of Jesus apparently convey, and 
carry out the real intent of what He does 
say. To those who misunderstood Him 
by such literalism, He says Himself : " It 
is the spirit that giveth life : the flesh 
profiteth nothing : the words that I have 
spoken unto you are spirit, and are life ,J 
(John vi. 63). 

What then does Jesus mean by urging 
non-resistance to evil ? He means that 
by the display of supreme and genuine 



106 Christian Conduct 

love His disciples should melt the hatred 
of those who hate them wherever this is 
possible. There is only one method for 
the cure of all evil, and it is not the homoe- 
opathic cure of evil by evil, but the allo- 
pathic one of evil by good. Unkindness 
can be turned into kindness only by love ; 
dishonesty, greed, sensuality, are the 
demons that can be cast out only by the 
breath of love. 

Literal Non-Resistance may be Best in Some 
Instances 

Just how this love is to be most wisely 
administered in each separate case must 
always remain for the Christian himself 
to decide. It may be that there will 
arise cases in which the literal turning of 
the other cheek shall prove the best way 
of exhibiting the love which Jesus in- 
culcates. If the offending person could 
only be made aware that it was love for 
him that moved the offended one to his 
course, and not some wily form of sel- 



In Social Relations 107 

fishness, seeking to secure ulterior ends, 
to gain an advantage in the game, nor 
craven cowardice and weakness, it might 
easily be seen that non-resistance would 
be the precise conduct proper to adopt. 
But in any case it is not so much just 
what is done as that what is done ex- 
presses one's love for the offender and is 
best calculated to win him from hatred 
to love. 

" Blessed are the Peacemakers ,j 

And, as in the case of one's own per- 
sonal relations, so in that of the conduct 
and relations of others. The disciple's 
instinctive attitude should be towards the 
extinction of all hatred and strife. So 
abhorrent indeed should he hold every 
breach of the law of love that he should 
spare no effort to heal such breach. In 
doing this, he will illustrate his true rela- 
tion to God Himself. " Blessed are the 
peacemakers, for they shall be called sons 
of God." 



108 Christian Conduct 

Rebuke of Anger 

As to the positive outbreaks which 
raise the question of resistance or non- 
resistance, Jesus nowhere expresses Him- 
self more severely and more explicitly 
than against them. " Everyone that is 
angry with his brother (without a cause) 
shall be in danger of the judgment: and 
whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, 
shall be in danger of the council : and 
whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be 
in danger of the hell of fire M (Matt. v. 22). 

"Judge not" 

Jesus is manifestly not content to wait 
until lovelessness has reached an open 
outbreak. He would watch its begin- 
nings, and pluck it out like a foul weed 
before it has come to produce its poison- 
ous fruit. He searches for it in the 
depths of the heart. " Every one that 
is angry shall be in danger of the judg- 
ment " even before he has expressed his 
anger in the first word. " Judge not that 



In Social Relations 109 

ye be not judged/' Censoriousness is 
the first step in the steep downward 
course. 

Positive Expression of Love 

Thus far, we have taken into account 
only the cases in which the law of love is 
violated or is in danger of violation. 
These are a part, possibly the smaller 
part, of its whole sphere of operation. 
After all, the experience of man includes 
more peace than warfare, more harmony 
than conflict, the pessimist to the contrary 
notwithstanding. Jesus would have all 
these more normal stages suffused and 
glorified by the control of a positive love. 
But this portion of the field was not de- 
batable ground, and Jesus does not go 
out of His way to speak of it simply 
in order to make an academically com- 
plete thesis on the subject. He takes 
it for granted that where the provocations 
to violate the requirement do not emerge, 
the law of love will be observed. 



no Christian Conduct 

Love's Many Forms 

Love is not indiscriminate ; but it is 
not exclusive. In other words, as there 
are different kinds and degrees of it, dif- 
ferent individuals coming into touch with 
the follower of Christ will claim each 
what is appropriate to himself. The 
kinsman will have a right to the love of 
kinship, the friend to the love of friend- 
ship, the distressed and needy to the love 
of compassion, and the prosperous to the 
unenvying love of congratulation. But 
there must be love for all, even the en- 
emy and the persecutor, the love which 
wishes the highest welfare, and will not 
deny those who bear these relations to 
one's self any needed blessing. This is 
the type of the love which God the 
heavenly Father lavishes. " For He 
maketh His sun to rise on the evil and 
the good, and sendeth rain on the just 
and on the unjust." 

Finally, love must be aggressive. It 



In Social Relations 1 1 1 

must not wait for an occasion which shall 
call it forth in order to make itself felt. 
It must seek, we may go further and say, 
it must create such occasions. This is 
undoubtedly to be gathered from the in- 
cident of the feet washing ( John xiii). 
Here, Jesus shows in an acted parable 
the spirit of humble service. The time 
has perhaps passed for insisting on not 
taking the incident in a literal sense, either 
as establishing a sacrament or as defining 
with precision the actual performance of 
such a duty simply in token of humility. 
Yet the spirit of the teaching, inculcating 
as it does the expression of love, in the 
self -abasing service of others, has not been 
and is not likely to be outgrown. 



CHAPTER IX 

The Christian in the State. 

rHE attitude of Jesus to the civil 
government of His day was a 
matter of the deepest interest and 
keenest concern to His own contempo- 
raries. The ideal relation of the loyal 
Israelite to the world-powers was differ- 
ently conceived by representatives of dif- 
ferent factions. It was a many-sided 
question. Should the faithful refuse to 
tolerate foreign rule and actively engage 
in schemes designed to terminate it? 
Should he accept the status quo under 
protest, but patiently wait the apocalyptic 
112 



The Christian In the State 1 13 

establishment of the divine order? Or 
should he consent to take it as the ex- 
pression of the divine will, and by sub- 
mission to it as unto God's righteous 
visitation for national sin, help to expiate 
that sin and bring the evil to an end ? 



Interest in Jesus Political Views 

What would Jesus say and teach the 
people on these questions ? They sent a 
deputation to Him to find out. They 
had a general idea that His view was not 
sound, and hoped He would explicitly 
commit Himself to an extreme state- 
ment. It were better that His statement 
should be explicit and extreme rather 
than mediating and ambiguous ; for in 
the former case, by charging Him with 
seditious teaching and proving Him 
guilty, they could be rid of his irritating 
activity. It is very plain that they meant 
to use any anti-Roman expressions in this 
way ; for their chief lever in moving 

H 



114 Christian Conduct 

Pilate to His crucifixion was just the 
charge of treason against Caesar. " If 
thou release this man, thou art not 
Caesar's friend : every one that maketh 
himself a king speaketh against Caesar " 
(John xix. 12). 

The question, Where does Jesus stand 
in politics? has not lost its interest and 
importance through the change from 
Roman imperial domination to modern 
democratic conditions. What did Jesus 
say of the ideal state ? is still being asked, 
and still variously answered. The be- 
liever in the unrighteousness of all gov- 
ernment claims Jesus on his side ; and 
the advocate of the strict authoritative 
organization of human society, with the 
definite commission of authority from 
above into the hands of rulers, asserts 
that his view is inevitably deduced from 
the principles of Jesus. The one may 
plead the absolute freedom which Jesus 
preached for all who were imbued with 
the spirit of filial love to God and 



The Christian In the State 1 1 5 

brotherly love to man for his side of the 
case. The sons of God need no con- 
straints of authority. But the other may 
plead the fact that Jesus recognized 
Caesar as having legitimate authority 
(Matt. xxii. 21). 

Jesus does not theorize on the State. His 
Double Relation to It 

Happily, we are not concerned with 
the question so far as it is a question of 
theory. This may be said, however, by 
way of a passing remark, that neither of 
the political schools alluded to have an 
unqualified right to cite Jesus as a sup- 
porter of their tenets. Jesus bears to- 
ward the state a double relation in the 
sphere of conduct. As far as His own 
personal actions are concerned (and let it 
be remembered that He would have all 
His disciples as nearly like Himself as 
possible), state authority did not exist and 
does not exist. That there is a govern- 



n6 Christian Conduct 

ment at some central place in the land, 
watching over all, and preserving for all 
their rights and privileges, adds nothing 
and takes away nothing from His char- 
acter. It is not meant that the safety 
and the right of the Christian to live in 
accordance with his Christian convictions 
are not secured by an ideal state, as they 
would not be where no government ex- 
isted ; but that as far as His conduct is 
concerned it would be neither less right- 
eous if the state were not there, nor is 
it more so because it is there. 

The other side of Jesus' relation to the 
state is that of the guardian of the 
brother's welfare. Since humanity is not 
in its ideal state, since, that is to say, there 
are in it those who are "lost/' it is a 
part of the law of love to reduce to the 
least the harm which such may do to 
themselves and to their fellow-beings. 
From this point of view, Jesus and His 
disciples become auxiliaries, even counter- 
parts of the state as such. They have a 



The Christian In the State 1 1 7 

definite duty to perform. It belongs to 
them to restrain, and, as far as possible, 
to abolish the outcropping of loveless- 
ness. 

It cannot be reiterated too often that 
the root and essence of all the evils from 
which mankind is suffering is loveless- 
ness. When these evils assume outward 
and glaring forms, the state interferes to 
counteract them. Its work is necessarily 
outward. It is none the less in the same 
interest as the work of the Christian dis- 
ciple, and may rightfully claim his en- 
couragement and active support. The 
state's function properly exercised curbs 
and removes the excesses of that which 
the Christian opposes, not simply as an 
excess, but in its every stage and form — 
"root and branch." The Christian, 
therefore, cannot be indifferent to the 
state's efforts to suppress and abolish all 
open evils since he himself is aiming to 
suppress and abolish not only all open but 
also all secret evil. 



1 1 8 Christian Conduct 

The Christian Citizen 

The conduct of the Christian in the 
state is not then to be limited to the 
mere recognition of the government as a 
necessity to be outgrown. He cannot be 
a mere apathetic and quiescent law- 
abiding citizen. That he must be and 
will be, not as a Christian but as a citizen. 
As a Christian he will so act as never to 
be aware from his own experience that 
there are laws to obey, except perhaps 
unrighteous ones. His Christianity and 
his citizenship will coalesce up to this 
point as a matter of course. 

The Christian citizen, however, will be 
much more than this. He will be a man 
interested in every measure of public 
welfare. He will throw himself actively 
into the purification of politics. He will 
endorse and support all efforts calculated 
to lessen vice and to send that remnant of 
it which may not be exterminated into 
comparatively innocuous hiding. He 



The Christian In the State 1 19 

will sympathize with those who are strug- 
gling with the problems of social reform 
and amelioration, and, if he be not him- 
self an active participant in these struggles, 
he will give substantial encouragement 
and financial backing to those who are. 

In a word, everything that will tend 
to make government thoroughly Chris- 
tian, everything that will tend to produce 
such legislation as will raise the person of 
man to a pinnacle, everything that will 
lead men to regulate their relations to one 
another upon the basis of fraternity, 
everything that will infuse the spirit of 
love into the administration of justice and 
will train the citizens to recognize in each 
other the image of the heavenly Father, 
must call for the enthusiastic approval and 
active co-operation of the disciple of Jesus 
Christ. 

Christian Citizenship and the Christian 
Nation 

There is still another side to the civic 



120 Christian Conduct 

life of the disciple of Jesus. As the leaf 
has stamped on itself the pattern of the 
tree, so the individual has on himself the 
pattern of the community or nation of 
which he is a member. It is often said 
that corporations have no souls. If this 
is true, it is because the souls of the in- 
dividuals that make them up are in some 
way defective, and their totality in the 
corporation results in the lack of a cor- 
porate soul big enough to make its pres- 
ence known. One man with a great 
soul has many a time made an honorable 
exception to the rule by infusing his own 
soul-force into its affairs. What is true 
of the corporation is equally true of the 
nation. A nation of true Christians could 
not help being a Christian nation. 

It has been said that " Christianity has 
been a powerful influence in the personal 
life of men, but it has failed equally to 
control the commercial and political life." 
There is a large grain of truth in this 
criticism, but it holds not against the ideal 



The Christian In the State 121 

Christianity, but against men's failure to 
actualize it. Let the law of Jesus be prac- 
tised in its integrity and completeness by 
individuals, and the result must inevitably 
be a nation possessed of and controlled by 
a Christian national conscience. And a 
nation acting out among nations the life 
which is ideally Christian will be exactly 
like an individual living his faith in Christ 
and his acceptance of Christ's teaching 
among individuals. The next step in 
the development of Christianity in the 
world's history should be the appearance 
of a thoroughly Christian nation to Chris- 
tianize international relations. 

The Christian Citizen and International 
Relations 

All this points to the final goal for all 
civic activity on the part of the disciple 
of Jesus ; it is the establishment of frater- 
nal relations among all the races and na- 
tions and tribes of mankind. The disciple 



122 Christian Conduct 

as an individual may appear impotent be- 
fore such a tremendous task. But it is 
as each individual disciple does what he 
can towards its accomplishment that the 
task will eventually be accomplished, 
and the kingdoms of the world become 
the kingdom of our Lord. Whatever, 
therefore, makes for peace and helpful- 
ness in international relations, whatever 
conduces to fairness, frankness and frater- 
nity in diplomacy, whatever diminishes 
the oppression of the weaker races by the 
stronger, whatever tends to the taking of 
the burdens of the inferior by the supe- 
rior upon themselves, calls for the cor- 
dial approval and help of the disciple of 
Jesus. 



CHAPTER X 

The Christian in the Family. 

rHERE are no relations in life 
which bring into clearer view the 
beauties of a character formed 
upon the basis of the principles of Jesus, 
than those which center about the home. 
Here, on account of the controlling pres- 
ence of natural affection, there is a 
beginning of loving service and self- 
sacrifice, even before the teaching of 
Jesus has come. But here, too, there 
are possibilities of a contrary tendency, 
such as appear nowhere else. The re- 
lations are close and at the same time 

123 



124 Christian Conduct 

compulsory. Should the natural affec- 
tion which is depended on to make them 
healthy and helpful prove weak or fail, 
the home is changed from a haven of 
rest and happiness into a place of fearful 
torment. 



The Home a Legitimate Sphere for 
Christian Love 

Accordingly, the home, where the 
love preached by Jesus might have ap- 
peared to be unnecessary, stands all the 
more in urgent need of that love. For 
this purer and holier love supplements the 
weakness of natural affection, making it 
constant and firm when it is in danger of 
failing ; it sanctifies and enhances it when 
sufficiently strong and imparts to all its 
workings the afflatus and aroma of divinity 
itself ; it takes up the lines created by the 
home, adopts them into the spiritual 
sphere, and fastens them on the eternal 
life of God Himself. It makes God a 



The Christian in the Family 1 25 

constant member and witness of the ex- 
periences of the home. In a true though 
spiritual sense, the commandment of love 
erects an altar in every household that 
may adopt it as its governing principle. 



The Family in the Age of Jesus 

It is of the highest importance, then, 
to ask, How did Jesus teach His disciples 
to regard the home and himself as a 
member of it ? The condition of affairs 
in His day did not leave Jesus the option 
of speaking or keeping silence upon this 
subject. The question was fairly thrust 
before His attention. Among the Ro- 
mans, the household had ceased to be 
what it once was, a sacred unity. The 
moralists and poets of the age give a sad 
picture of the situation. The Christian 
writers of a century or two later may be 
considered prejudiced in favor of another 
ideal, and therefore their accounts of 
family life among the heathen may have 



126 Christian Conduct 

to be discounted ; but the heathen philos- 
ophers, speaking out of the midst of the 
conditions themselves, give the same pic- 
ture in quite as clear lines and colors. 

In the nearer circle of Judaism also, 
the spirit of laxity had appeared. By 
adopting a liberal interpretation of the 
law in Deuteronomy the rabbis had in- 
culcated loose views of the marriage tie, 
and without theorizing on the subject, 
the Jews had practically settled to the 
modern day doctrine that marriage is a 
civil contract. 

The Family a Divine Institution 

Here then, at the very root of the 
whole matter, Jesus found it necessary 
to strike the first blow. The foundation 
of His teaching is that the home is a di- 
vine institution, not a result of gradual 
development during the course of hu- 
man history. If that had been the case, 
there would have been a time when the 
human race lived and fulfilled the will of 



The Christian in the Family 127 

God without the family. And there 
might be a time in a different stage of 
evolution in the future, when the family 
should be antiquated and outlived as a 
matter of convenience. This, according 
to Jesus, is impossible. " He who made 
them from the beginning, made them 
male and female, and said, For this cause 
shall a man leave his father and mother, 
and shall cleave to his wife ; and the 
two shall become one flesh ' ( Matt, 
xix. 4, 5). 

The origin of the home, then, is to be 
traced to a direct act of God. " From the 
beginning/' He had a definite plan on the 
subject, and it was a plan to prevail and 
last as long as mankind should. That 
plan involved the union of one man with 
one woman. Violations of this rule, 
Jesus considers as departures from the 
ideal. To this His age and generation 
could not interpose any objection. Ju- 
daism had settled down to the general 
conclusion that polygamy should be 



128 Christian Conduct 

abandoned. With very few exceptions, 
no Israelite took advantage of the prece- 
dents given in the earlier history of the 
Old Testament in favor of polygamy. 

Jesus and Divorce 

There was, however, another practice 
which amounted to virtual polygamy, 
/. e., easy divorce. The ancients had 
entered into legalized relations with more 
than one wife at the same time ; the men 
of Jesus' age substituted for this, separa- 
tion from one wife upon slight grounds 
and union with another. The appear- 
ance and responsibility of a polygamous 
household were avoided ; but the essential 
principle of the family as a divine ordinance 
headed by one man and one woman, was 
effectually set at nought. The difference 
between the ancients and the contempo- 
raries of Jesus was simply that the former 
did not put away one wife in order to 
take another, and the latter did. Jesus, 



The Christian in the Family 1 29 

of course, could not but denounce the 
practice. " Everyone that putteth away 
his wife and marrieth another commit- 
ted! adultery, and he that marrieth one 
that is put away from a husband commit- 
teth adultery " (Luke xvi. 18 ; Matt. v. 
32). 

Marriage was according to Jesus a life- 
long union. Divorce was not to be 
thought of as included in this idea. 
Neither state nor church could in the 
strict sense grant a divorce. The only 
person or persons that could accomplish 
the breaking of the tie were the parties 
united in marriage, and they could not 
do so except by a heinous sin against the 
law of God. A man " could put away 
his wife for the cause of fornication only ,J 
(Matt. xix. 9), which means that putting 
away is simply a testimony against the 
sin committed, a declaration that the tie 
is broken. It is not divorce that breaks 
up the marriage relation, but the sin 
which precedes and furnishes ground for 



130 Christian Conduct 

it. The separation which takes place 
and which may be called by the name of 
divorce, or any other, is nothing more 
than the recognition of the fact that the 
bond has been broken. Divorce of an 
innocent nature, /. e. y divorce out of which 
both parties emerge without sin before 
God and men is unthinkable in the ideal 
of Jesus. 

The theory underlying this view seems 
to be that when marriage is constituted 
as an ordinance of God, it results in the 
creation of a new unity, which is a new 
organism. That organism cannot be 
destroyed without offence to God any 
more than a living human being can be 
arbitrarily put to death. But when by a 
transgression of this law it has been de- 
stroyed, as there are two parties constitut- 
ing it, the party that is blameless has the 
right to have the rupture declared and 
thus secure freedom. 

He or she has this right. Jesus does 
not, however, through His teaching make 



The Christian in the Family 131 

it obligatory on them to use it. It is a 
permissive rather than a mandatory law. 
In a case where the ground of divorce 
recognized by Jesus as the only valid one 
exists, and the aggrieved party is perfectly 
satisfied that the sin has been sincerely 
repented of, and desires to extend for- 
giveness and a continuation of the old re- 
lation, there is nothing in what Jesus has 
said to forbid. Rather the opposite ; the 
law of forgiveness and reconciliation 
would dictate, or at any rate encourage, 
this course. 

When Marriage May Not Be Entered 

This element of voluntariness in the 
matter applies with equal force to the 
whole subject of marriage. It is not ob- 
ligatory to marry. Rather than do so, 
and violate the law of the Kingdom, 
Jesus would have men made " eunuchs " 
for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven 
(Matt. xix. 12). The emphasis here is 
upon the phrase " Kingdom of heaven." 



132 Christian Conduct 

The disciples had objected to His law re- 
garding marriage, that it made it prefer- 
able not to marry. He grants the posi- 
tion that it is better at times not to marry, 
but explains that the ground for such 
conduct should not be the impossibility 
of dissolving the tie without sin, nor the 
obligation to abide perpetually in the 
covenant relationship, but other and 
higher reasons. There are some who 
by birth and natural endowment are shut 
out to a single life. There are others 
whom the exigencies of human affairs 
compel to the same state. "They are 
made eunuchs of men." There is a third 
class consisting of those who voluntarily 
adopt this mode of life " for the King- 
dom of heaven's sake." In all cases, but 
especially the last, the law of fraternal 
love dictates this course. 

Purity an Inner Quality 

The same law of fraternal love guards 
individuals against those offences which 



The Christian in the Family 133 

without breaking the marriage bond 
directly, relax and lower this high ideal, 
preached by Jesus. It is not necessary 
that the act of adultery should have been 
performed ; not even the act of fornica- 
tion, which may not involve an attack 
upon the sanctity of a particular family ; 
it is enough that the lustful thought 
should have been encouraged in the 
heart to call for the condemnation of 
Jesus (Matt. v. 28). 

Relations within the Home 

The regulation of the relations of the 
various members of the household to one 
another and the prescription of their re- 
spective duties was not within the scope 
of the mission of Jesus. On this matter, 
as on all other matters of detail, He al- 
lowed the principles He taught to work 
out their own practical bearings. It was 
enough that the divine origin, the sacred 
character and the lifelong duration of the 
social bond of the family should be held 



134 Christian Conduct 

before the eye. If this was appreciated, 
it could not but result in the engendering 
of the constitutive power of love. Nay, 
it must do more than that ; it must foster 
and develop this motive by the healthy 
result of the ideally organized household. 
And where love rules, the prescription of 
duties to husbands towards their wives, or 
to wives towards their husbands ; to chil- 
dren towards their parents and to parents 
towards their children, to brothers and sis- 
ters towards one another, would be a work 
of supererogation. Such flagrant viola- 
tions of duty as that rebuked in Mark 
vii. 10-13, would be absolutely impossible. 

Jesus and Woman 

The attitude of Jesus towards the ques- 
tion of woman's position in society is left 
in the sources in such an indefinite form 
that diametrically opposite views re- 
garding it have been propounded. On 
the one side it has been said that Jesus 
treated women as the rest of the Jews of 



The Christian in the Family 135 

His day did ; and this as a natural conse- 
quence of His acceptance of the Old 
Testament system and its generally low 
view of woman. Hence His teaching, 
had He cared to give it explicitly, would 
not have been far above the level of that 
of His contemporaries. 

On the other hand, all that has gone 
towards the emancipation and elevation 
of woman to the position of equality with 
her brother man has been read into His 
teaching. The truth is that Jesus said 
nothing explicitly ; but His personal atti- 
tude towards women, while little differ- 
ent perhaps outwardly from that of His 
contemporaries, was in spirit exactly the 
opposite, and by placing love and frater- 
nity at the center of the whole circle of 
human activity, He set in motion the so- 
cial forces that were destined inevitably 
to bring about a complete revolution and 
lead to the later developments on this 
point. 



CHAPTER XI 

The Christian in Business. 

71 #UCH of what Jesus says on busi- 
j[fj[ ness affairs appears to be in 
glaring contradiction with the 
rules and practices of modern Christen- 
dom. And perhaps upon the whole 
there is no department of human activity 
into which it has been more difficult to 
admit His influence than the industrial 
and commercial world. If His precepts 
were adhered to with even ordinary re- 
gard to their superficial sense, present- 
day commerce and finance would have 
to be radically reorganized. 
136 



The Christian in Business 137 

General Character of Jesus Teaching on 
Business 

But it is quite possible on the other 
hand to take these utterances of Jesus so 
literally that they could not possibly be 
put into execution as rules of conduct. 
" Give to him that asketh of thee, and 
of him that taketh away thy goods, ask 
them not again." How long would a 
man be in position to carry on business 
transactions if he acted that out literally ? 
The fact is, that in this matter, as in 
the teachings regarding apparent non- 
resistance to evil, Jesus is expressing em- 
phatically and impressively the cardinal 
law of love. Philanthropy and business 
are ordinarily supposed to be at the op- 
posite poles of the sphere. " You would 
not expect a philanthropist to be a prac- 
tical man/' says one who claims to repre- 
sent the latter type. And as Jesus' pre- 
dominant teaching had a philanthropic 
tendency and result, even though it may 



138 Christian Conduct 

not come under that misused name as 
commonly understood, it has occasionally 
been charged with being visionary. But 
Jesus is not a philanthropist of the type 
found in works of fiction. If He does lay 
stress on the altruistic side of all relations, 
it is because men in His day, like men in 
all ages, have more need of being driven 
to see these than the selfish sides of the 
same relations. 

In fact there is that in business pursuits 
which fosters and nourishes the selfish 
instincts. " Not in the business for love/' 
is a colloquialism showing how com- 
pletely business and love are supposed to 
be separated from one another and irrec- 
oncilable in the same person. Men are 
willing to be benevolent, but they do not 
care to have their benevolence mixed 
with their business. It is these condi- 
tions, the same in His day as now, that 
determined the form of Jesus' expres- 
sions on this subject. But after we 
realize that in order to reach His thought 



The Christian in Business 139 

we must seize upon the central principle, 
and not upon the accidental and passing 
features of the way He expressed it, we 
shall have little trouble in seeing here, too, 
the one dominant idea of love to men as 
men to be the ruling principle of the 
conduct prescribed by Jesus. 

Jesus and the Question of Property 

Here, for instance, is the question : Is 
the disciple of Jesus permitted to hold 
property ? The answer is, Only if he 
can do so consistently with the law of 
love. What a man is, is of more impor- 
tance than what he has or does. " A 
man's life consisteth not in the abundance 
of the things which he possesseth." 
Jesus did not give every rich man that 
came to Him the command to go and 
sell all that he had and to distribute unto 
the poor (Luke xviii. 22). In the case 
in which He did give this command, the 
event showed that that was precisely 
what the young man needed to be told ; 



140 Christian Conduct 

without that self-stripping and self-con- 
secration, for him it was impossible to 
attain Christ's condition for holding 
wealth. Only as he was willing to re- 
nounce all, would he have proven him- 
self to possess the state of mind and heart 
which would make him competent to 
use it rightly. 

Upon this condition, however, /. e., of 
the ability to make proper use of prop- 
erty, Jesus bases the tacit but unquestion- 
able recognition of the right to acquire 
and hold it. " Sell that ye have and give 
alms " (Luke xii. 33), He says. But how 
can one sell what he does not have a 
right to own or use ? Zacchaeus was con- 
verted from an extortioner to a just man, 
and declared that he would make restitu- 
tion of what he had unjustly taken. 
Jesus did not require him to give up 
everything. Among His friends there 
were persons who owned houses, like 
the family at Bethany (John xii. 1-5), 
also Peter (Matt. viii. 14), and means out 



The Christian in Business 141 

of which they ministered to him (Luke 
viii. 3). He nowhere requires them to 
relinquish their hold on these things. In 
His parables, He repeatedly bases His 
moral teachings upon the right use of 
money. The word " talent " has come to 
be so generally understood in the sense of 
a natural gift or power, that we often for- 
get its primary meaning of a unit of 
money (Matt. xxv. 14-30 ; Luke xix. 
13-27 ; xvi. 1-13 ; xii. 16-31). 

Spiritual Perils of Wealth 

But if the acquisition of wealth is in 
itself right and necessary, the temptations 
and dangers that beset it are both nu- 
merous and serious. So are the dangers 
attending the use of money. The first 
and most obvious of these is the insidious 
transference of wealth from the place of 
a means to that of an end of life. Where 
this takes place, and it does take place in 
an incredibly large proportion of in- 
stances, the sin of covetousness has made 



142 Christian Conduct 

its appearance full-fledged, and against 
covetousness Jesus has a definite warning 
to give. "Take heed, and beware of 
covetousness/' This is what makes riches 
such a hindrance in the effort to enter 
the kingdom of heaven. " How hardly 
shall they that have riches enter into the 
kingdom of God " (Luke xviii. 25). 

Character above all Wealth 

If riches are always to be regarded as 
a means towards an end, and not an end 
in themselves, the slightest blemish pro- 
duced in the soul in the process of their 
acquisition and use is an incalculable loss. 
" What shall a man give in exchange for 
his soul?" must not be interpreted too 
narrowly as referring simply to the total 
loss of a person in eternity, but to all 
weakenings and pollutions of the spiritual 
life, to all sacrifice of spiritual interest, 
for mere material advantage in the life 
that now is. No amount of money can 
pay for a blot on character. 



The Christian in Business 143 

The Right Use of Wealth 

But this is a negative conclusion. Its 
converse in the positive form is quite as 
true and even more urgent. Wealth 
must be transformed into manhood if it 
shall serve its true and lawful purpose. 
Otherwise, even though not abused, it is 
no better than rubbish. It can be trans- 
muted into the pure gold of manhood 
by being used in the expression of love 
or in the relief of distress and want. 
Both of these uses are perfectly legiti- 
mate. Ordinarily, the latter is given the 
preference. Its propriety is, of course, 
more obvious. But there are circum- 
stances when the mere expression of 
well-placed sentiment would rightfully 
claim precedence. When they mur- 
mured because in the house of Simon 
the leper at Bethany a woman poured 
upon His head the precious ointment 
from the alabaster cruse (Matt. xxvi. 7). 
Jesus bade them not interfere with her, 



144 Christian Conduct 

and declared her act to be a good work ; 
it expressed her devotion. 

Jesus' Wholesome Reticence on Details. 

It is becoming clearer as the modern 
industrial evolution is rapidly presenting 
the new phases of the problem of em- 
ployment, that there was a supreme wis- 
dom in the silence with which Jesus 
treats the relations of the laboring men 
of His day to their rich employers. Had 
He pronounced judgment upon the facts 
as existing in His day, it would have been 
an easy matter to plead that the changed 
conditions of modern life rendered His 
judgments inapplicable and therefore val- 
ueless. As it is, He effectively reaches 
all conditions of all ages by laying down 
fundamental principles whose value - and 
applicability can never be outgrown. 

Capitalist and laboring man will have 
no difficulty in solving their problems, if 
they will only go to Jesus and learn 
from Him His law of love. There is no 



The Christian in Business 145 

crying evil in the situation which is not 
provided for by some application of that 
law. Were the law perfectly obeyed, dis- 
honesty either on a large scale or on a 
small scale would utterly disappear. So 
would cruelty and the sacrifice of purity 
and honor. To diminish one's respect 
for truth, to come out less kind and con- 
siderate from a business transaction for 
the sake of any amount of material gain, 
would be impossible. 
J 



CHAPTER XII 

The Christian in the Church 

JESUS not only outlined the ideal 
which His followers should realize 
in the world, but He also provided 
a social organization which should enact 
and enforce His ideals. The question, 
did He do this in a formal and explicit 
manner need not detain us. It is enough 
that He gathered about Himself a band 
of associates and followers, and that out 
of that band there has arisen a large com- 
munity, held together by peculiar ties ; 
it is enough that the Church exists as the 
visible body of those who take Jesus 
146 



The Christian in the Church 147 

Christ as their final authority on all 
things. That fact must have inevitable 
bearings on the conduct of those who 
constitute the community. And if the 
relations of the members of the church 
to one another are in principle the rela- 
tions which the members of the original 
band of His intimate followers sustained 
to one another, His instructions to these 
are in a sense the charter and constitution 
of the church of the ages succeeding. 

The Law of Love Adapted to the New 
Community 

But did not He give the same law of 
love to His disciples to govern them in 
their relations with one another as well 
as to govern them in their conduct and 
relations to the world ? He undoubtedly 
did. Yet this law works into varying ex- 
pressions as it operates upon different 
classes of relationships, just as the same 
sunshine operates differently as it falls on 
water or on the germ-laden soil in the 



148 Christian Conduct 

spring time ; the one it transforms into 
vapor and scatters abroad, the other it 
helps to integrate the forces imbedded in 
it and push them to the surface in the 
form of organized living, growing plants. 
Let us look at the working of the law 
of love within the community of those 
who with one accord put themselves un- 
der its sway and undertake to harmonize 
their conduct to its requirements. The 
first visible result is that these at once rec- 
ognize in each other children of the same 
heavenly Father. They are "brethren." 
That is what they called each other in 
the earliest days. And it was not a name 
which they devised for themselves, though 
they might have done so in the circum- 
stances, but one which they took in pur- 
suance of His desire and teaching. " And 
all ye are brethren " (Matt. xiii. 8). And 
they are His brethren ( John xx 17 ; 
Luke viii. 21) ; but if His brethren, could 
they be anything else than brethren to 
one another ? 



The Christian in the Church 1 49 

The Love of the Brethren. 

From the recognition of the relation- 
ships there naturally sprang a peculiar af- 
fection, that of brotherly love. It has 
already been remarked (p. 46.) that Chris- 
tian love must be all-comprehensive ; but 
all-comprehensiveness is by no means in- 
consistent with discrimination. To love 
one's enemies is just as much a Christian 
duty as to love one's friends. But it is as 
impossible to bestow the same kind of af- 
fection alike on friends and enemies as it 
is to think of one's enemies as friends and 
of friends as enemies. Neither the prin- 
ciple nor the example of Jesus points to 
a blotting out of all distinctions and the 
dealing out of affection to all in equal 
measure and of identical kind. Every 
special relationship creates a special bond 
whose strength and value depend upon 
the conditions that call it forth. 

The relationship created by community 
of life and interest in the Kingdom of God 



150 Christian Conduct 

engenders a unique bond. Here the con- 
ditions for intimacy are so favorable that 
the love for one another of those who 
recognize in each other the special signs 
of loyalty to a common Master takes a 
new name. The early Christians called 
it the "love of the brethren" ((^iXaSeX^ta). 
Its distinctive sign was its resemblance to 
the love which Christ displayed for His 
followers. Ic A new commandment I 
give unto you, that ye love one another ; 
even as I have loved you, that ye also love 
one another. By this shall all men know 
that ye are my disciples, if ye have love 
one to another " (John xiii. 34, 35). 

Distinctive Signs of Brotherly Love 

What, then, was the character of His 
love to them ? How did it differ from 
other forms of love ? First of all, it was 
spontaneous and not responsive. He 
first loved them because His Father in 
heaven wished to have them made the 
recipients of a special blessing. His 



The Christian in the Church 151 

love sprang not from the discovery of 
any ground or conditions in them. It 
had its roots in the mere fact that they 
were to enjoy the privileges of the chil- 
dren of God. That was sufficient. So 
the Christian must love those who bear 
the name of Christ before they have 
done anything to show that they merit 
that love. The mere fact that they have 
identified themselves with the cause and 
name of Christ should of itself be suffi- 
cient as an appeal to the Christian's heart, 
to rouse in him the love of the brethren. 
If this love shall be like Christ's, how- 
ever, it must, further, be a self-denying 
love. It is easy to love when it costs 
nothing. It is easier to love when love 
produces satisfaction. Such love, how- 
ever, is more or less selfish. It is not so 
easy to love when sacrifice of time and 
comfort and life are sure to follow. But 
that is the type of love that Christ leaves 
as an example to His followers. " h§ I 
have loved you." 



152 Christian Conduct 

Duties of Christian Brotherhood : Care for 
the Brother s Soul 

The duties which grow out of broth- 
erly love are pointed out quite clearly. 
One of them is to do all that it is possible 
towards helping the brother in the right 
path. A case is supposed : If a brother 
offend, the first duty is to give him an 
opportunity in a private interview to cor- 
rect his offence. If this should prove in- 
sufficient, a second and more earnest 
effort must be made. Before a limited 
number of witnesses, he should lovingly 
be called upon to recognize and make 
amends for his fault. But if this also 
prove a failure, a third and more im- 
pressive appeal to his conscience should 
be made before the whole body of those 
who love Christ, the Church. If he 
prove intractable to all these influences, 
then, and only then, may one cease to 
regard him as a brother in Christ. All 
this is evidently intended rather to secure 



The Christian in the Church 153 

the rescue of the sinning brother than to 
guarantee the rendering of justice to the 
one sinned against. It is rather the per- 
formance of the duty of guardianship 
than that of the vindication of law. 

II. Mutual Service 

In a similar strain is the principle of 
mutual service in the organization of be- 
lievers. An organization must have offi- 
cers and regulations subordinating some 
to the authority of others. While this 
is a necessity, those who are ambitious to 
fill the places of office in the church 
should see that their ambition is rooted 
in the desire to serve not in the love of 
authority. The lust for dominion is es- 
sentially a non-Christian sentiment. " Ye 
know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord 
it over them, and their great ones exer- 
cise authority over them. Not so shall 
it be among you ; but whosoever would 
become great among you shall be your 
minister ; and whosoever would be first 



154 Christian Conduct 

among you shall be your servant " (Matt. 
xx. 25-27 ; also Matt, xxiii. 8-10, " Be 
ye not called Rabbi/ ' etc.). In other 
words, mutual helpfulness is the distin- 
guishing badge of the disciples in their re- 
lations with one another as disciples. Of 
course, essentially, the disciple's conduct 
towards all men, even those without the 
circle to which he belongs, should be 
one of self-sacrificing service. The dif- 
ference between his attitude towards 
men at large and his attitude towards his 
fellow-disciples is simply that with ref- 
erence to the latter, in the nature of 
the case, a tenderer feeling pervades, 
and an expectation of responsiveness 
exists. 

III. Submission to the Brethren in Love 

For if it is incumbent to exercise a 
certain watchful care over those who, 
like him, bear the name of Christ, it is 
also incumbent on him to receive from 
his brethren the word of exhortation and 



The Christian in the Church 155 

admonition with fraternal trust in the 
underlying love that prompts it. 

Finally, the Christian owes a duty to 
the Church as a whole. He must con- 
tribute all the service of which he is ca- 
pable towards its helpful life and expan- 
sion. It is his part to preserve it from 
all corruption and make it the most 
effective vehicle towards the carrying out 
of Christ's desire to conquer the world 
and bring it into subjection to God. 

Jesus and Public Worship 

Of worship, whether in the Church 
or apart from its public function, Jesus 
has little to say. It was a part of that 
external sphere whose exact forms al- 
ways depend on changing conditions and 
circumstances. Though He is not any- 
where recorded to have offered sacrifices 
at the Temple, or fasted, He does not 
forbid others from doing so. On the 
contrary, He distinctly implies that life 
would furnish emergencies for the ex- 



156 Christian Conduct 

pression of the spirit in fasting and self- 
denial. He does, however, see and warn 
against the danger of hypocrisy in such 
matters. When religious practices are 
actuated not by the impulse to express 
the content of the heart, but by the de- 
sire for ostentation or by worse motives, 
His denunciation of them is unmeasured. 
On the other hand, nothing exceeds in 
its cordiality and warmth His commenda- 
tion of simple acts of religious service 
which truly represent a healthy spiritual 
condition. The widow with her two 
mites stands on a vastly higher plain than 
all those who out of their abundance had 
cast into the treasury their incomparably 
larger offerings. He judged them all 
not by what they gave, but by what they 
had left. They had practically as much 
as before they made their contributions. 
Therefore, she excelled them. 

But at this point, Christian conduct 
once more ceases to be a mere matter of 
external relationships and passes into the 



The Christian in the Church 157 

realm of the inner life. It issues in the 
love of God and His Kingdom, runs the 
whole circle of earthly relationships and 
returns to the love for God and man, 
which will not allow its possessor to re- 
main satisfied with his own assured bless- 
edness, but is destined to lead him to 
communicate the good he has to others 
as widely as possible. 



CHAPTER XIII 

Summary. 

/T will be unnecessary, after what has 
been said, to call special attention to 
the absolute uniqueness of the ethi- 
cal teaching of Jesus. It differs from 
every other system the world has ever 
seen. Even what is called Christian 
ethics must not be mistaken for Jesus' 
idea of righteousness. Christian ethics 
is an interpretation of the thought of 
Jesus ; and, like all interpretations, it is 
only an approximation. Christian ethics 
is a growing science. It grows by the 
addition through experience of the new 
1 58 



Summary 159 

insight gained into the ideal at its core. 
" If any man willeth to do His will, he 
shall know of the teaching.' ' As Chris- 
tians earnestly accept and practice the 
principles of Jesus, they discover more 
and more of the divine mind in them. 
Meantime, the ideal remains always in 
advance of the actual, whether that actual 
be embodied in a theoretical statement 
of what conduct should be, or in a prac- 
tical expression of conduct in life. 

The chief features of Jesus' ideal of 
conduct may be summed up in the fol- 
lowing : 

1. Jesus shows conduct as the result 
of a vital inner force. Conduct may be 
produced mechanically, as when certain 
unvarying rules are blindly obeyed. It 
may be produced dynamically as when 
some motive, be it selfish or altruistic, 
actuates it ; but it may be the result of a 
vital unifying, organizing and integrating 
energy. In the ideal of Jesus it is this, 
and the force which produces it is love. 



160 Christian Conduct 

2. Jesus shows conduct to be a matter 
of divine concern. Its roots and its issue 
are in eternity. No one who appreciates 
the thought of the Master can live as if 
what he did was his own business only. 
Or that it began and ended in this earthly 
existence. The picture of a great judg- 
ment and reward according to the deeds 
done in the body is necessary to fill out 
Jesus' idea of conduct as a whole. 

3. Jesus not only tells what conduct 
should be, but lives it; and He proves 
thereby that it is no mere vision in the 
clouds which cannot be brought down to 
earth. But through this same feature of 
it, He shows the perfection of the ideal. 
Perfection includes the best quality in 
the highest quantity and with absolute 
proportion and harmony of parts. The 
revelation of perfection in Jesus shows 
the disciple what he ought to do, what 
he can do, but what he has not done ; 
it thus drives him to seek for his peace 
of mind and his hope of blessedness not 



Summary 161 

in the sphere of outward conduct, but 
in the inner life of his relation with the 
Father. 

4. Jesus gives a true starting-point and 
standard for conduct in a just and sane 
self-regard. Complete self-regard be- 
gins with self-discovery, proceeds with 
self-study and self-mastery, rises to self- 
esteem and culminates in self-culture, 
including self-development and self- 
realization. 

5. Jesus unifies and universalizes the 
social principle in conduct. Modern 
science, through the spectroscope, re- 
veals the fact that the same ultimate ele- 
ments and the same forces are found 
throughout the whole universe. Science 
appears indeed to be coming to the con- 
clusion that all the various forces are 
forms of but one energy. Jesus antici- 
pates this conclusion of physical science 
in the moral world. He posits at the 
centre of all moral action the one law of 
love. Whether in the state, in society, 

K 



1 62 Christian Conduct 

in the home, in commerce and industry 
or in the church, the one normal motive 
for action is love, 

6. Finally, Jesus shows the goal of all 
conduct to be assimilation to the one 
absolute and ultimate personality, the 
heavenly Father. "Ye therefore shall 
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is 
perfect." Man was made in the image 
of God, and to possess this image in per- 
fection is the highest achievement of his 
moral activities. 



INDEX OF SUBJECTS 

A 
Adaptation in teaching, 29, 30. 
Alexandrian psychology, 16. 
Altruism, 65, 70. 
Am Haaretz, 21. 
Anger, 99, 108. 
Arnold, Matthew, 10. 

B 

Beatitudes, 98. 

Body, care for, 81 ff. 

Briggs, 4. 

Brotherhood of Disciples, 148. 

leads to mutual care, 152. 

mutual service, 153. 

submission to one another, 154. 
Buddha, 38. 

C 

Caesar's authority, 115. 
Cambridge Ms. of Gospels, 95, 96. 

^3 



164 Index of Subjects 

Chastity, 132, 133. 
Church, founded by Jesus, 146. 
Commercial relations, 136 f. 
Conduct, its importance, 10. 

and life, 12, 84, 156, 

and religion, 17. 
Confucius, 38. 
Conscience, 25. 

D 

Decalogue, 32, 39, 90. 
Divorce, Jesus on, 128. 

E 

Edersheim, 88 n. 
Epicureans, 39. 
Essenes, 16. 
Ethics, Christian, 158. 

and psychology, 14. 

of the Old Testament, 31, 32, 44, 

of Paganism, 376°. 

of Pharisees, 47 ff. 

F 

Family of divine origin, 126, 127. 
Fatherhood of God, 54. 
Fourth Gospel, problem of, 7. 



Index of Subjects 165 

G 

Genuineness of sayings of Jesus, 3. 
Gibbon, 61 n. 
Golden rule, 60. 

originality of, 62. 

pre-Christian forms, 61. 
Gospel criticism, 1 ff. 
Government, functions of, 116. 
Grenfell & Hunt, 5, 

H 

Hedge of the law, 49. 

Hillel, 62. 

Home relations in Jesus' day, 125. 

ideal relations in, 133. 
Hyde, W. D., 39. 

I 
Immortality, 18. 
Intuitional ethics, 24. 

J 

Josephus, 16 n. 

Julicher, 5. 

K 

Kant, 65. 

Kingdom of God, 8, 41, 81, 94, 132, 149, 157. 



1 66 Index of Subjects 

L 

Legge, 61. 

Lex talionis, ioo. 

Love, the law of, 9, 44, 71. 

root of all morality, 55, 117. 

concretely illustrated, 97. 

many-sided, 1 10. 

has a sphere in the home, 124. 

in business life, 143. 

adapted to the Church, 147. 
Love of the brethren, 149, 150. 
its distinctive signs, 150 ff. 

M 
Marriage, 129, 130, 132. 
Morality, taught by Jesus, 55, 56. 

inwardness of, 56. 

freedom, 57. 

comprehensiveness, 58. 
Mutualism, 64, 70. 

N 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73. 
Non-resistance of evil, 103. 

O 

Offences, 98. 



Index of Subjects 167 

Old Testament ethics, 31, 32, 44. 
Old Testament Theology, 40, 41. 

view of the Sabbath, 86. 

P 
Pagan ethics, 37 ff. 
Parables, Good Samaritan, 46. 

Prodigal, 75. 
Personality supreme, 119, 142. 
Pharisaic ethics, 47 ff. 
Pharisee, 22, 52, 57. 
Philo, views of the origin of man, 16. 
Politics, Jesus' attitude towards, 113, 114. 
Prophets, 35, 40, 41. 
Property, Jesus' teaching on, 139. 

R 

Retaliation, 99. 
Righteousness, 43. 

of God, 53. 

S 
Sabbath, the, 85 ff. 

adaptability, 91. 

change of method of observance, 92, 

man's need of, 89. 

means of culture, 85. 



1 68 Index of Subjects 

Sabbath, means of holiness, 86. 

Old Testament law of, 86. 
Rabbinical legislation, 87. 
Sadducees, 18. 
Schmiedel, 2. 
Self, love of, 72 ff. 

provided for in nature, 72, 73. 

knowledge of, 74 ff. 

mastery of, 78 ff. 
Sermon on the Mount, 97, 98. 
Shammai, 62. 
Socrates, 38. 
Stoics, 38. 
Synoptic problem, 6. 

U 

Utilitarianism, 22. 

W 

Wealth, its perils, 141. 

right use of, 143. 

subordinate to character, 142. 
Wellhausen, 36. 
Wernle, 5. 
Westcott, 96. 
Widow with two mites, 156. 



Index of Subjects 169 

Wisdom, form of teaching, 4. 

Woman, Jesus' views of her position, 134 f. 

Worship, 155. 

Z 

Zacchaeus, conversion of, 140, 



INDEX OF TEXTS. 



Matthew v. 20 


47 


Matthew xx. 25 


22 


22 


108 


27 


154 


28 


x 33 


xxii. 21 


"5 


29 


80 


3 2 


19 


32 


129 


35,39 


45,54 


39 ^ 


103 


xxiii. 4 


52 


44 


60 


8 


10 


48 


26 


xxv. 14—30 


141 


vi. 25 ff. 


82 


xxvi. 7 


H3 


33 


53 






vii. 12 


60 


Mark ii. 26 ff. 


89 


viii. 14 


140 


27. 28 


89 


x. 28 ff. 


15, 23 


vii. 8-13 


48 


xii. 1 1 ff. 


89 


10-13 


134 


xiii. 8 


148 


x. 45 


22 


xvi. 26 


80 






xviii. 21 


99 


Luke vi. 4 


96 


xix. 4, 5 


127 


9 


89 


9 


129 


viii. 21 


148 


12 


73, 1 3 I 


x. 25 


46 


29 


2 3 


xi. 46 


26 


170 









Index of Texts 



171 



Luke xii. 4 


15 


xiii. passim 


in 


16-31 


141 


34, 35 


150 


33 


140 


xvi. 33 


23 


xiii. 3, 14 


89 


xvii. 4 


18 


xvi. 1— 13 


141 


xviii. 22, 23 


104 


18 


129 


xix. 12 


114 


xviii. 22 


139 


xx. 17 


148 


25 


142 


- 




xix. 13—27 


hi 


1 Timothy vi. 15 


19 


John vi. 63 


105 






viii. 22 


89 


1 Peter ii. 22, 23 


27 


X. 10 


11 






xii. 1-5 


140 


Hebrews i. 1 


42 






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